Chemotherapy, while considered an effective cancer treatment, also brings debilitating side effects such as nausea, liver toxicity and a battered immune system.

A new way to deliver this life-saving therapy to cancer patients has been developed by researches at Tel Aviv University. Dr. Dan Peer of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Cell Research and Immunology and Prof. Rimona Margalit of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology led the research.

The breakthrough technology consists of a nano-sized vehicle with the ability to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly into cancer cells while avoiding interaction with healthy cells, increasing the efficiency of chemotherapeutic treatment while reducing its side effects.

Dr. Peer explained the vehicle is very similar to a cluster bomb. Inside the nano-vehicle itself are tiny particles of chemotherapy drugs. When the delivery vehicle comes into contact with cancer cells, it releases the chemotherapeutic payload directly into the cell. According to Dr. Peer, the nano-medical device can be used to treat many different types of cancer, including lung, blood, colon, breast, ovarian, pancreatic, and even several types of brain cancers.

The finding was recently reported in the journal Biomaterials.

A Sweet Payload to Trick Cancer: The key to the drug delivery platform is the molecule used to create the outer coating of this cluster nano-vehicle, a sugar recognized by receptors on many types of cancer cells.  When the nano-vehicle interacts with the receptor on the cancerous cell, the receptor undergoes a structural change and the chemotherapy payload is released directly into the cancer cell which leads to more focused chemotherapeutic treatment against the diseased cells.

Because the nano-vehicle reacts only to cancer cells, the healthy cells that surround them remain untouched and unaffected by the therapy. The nano-vehicle itself, is made from organic materials which fully decompose in the body once it has performed its function, making the treatment safer than current therapies.

Clinical Trials Coming Soon: This drug will be an improvement on anything currently on the market. Delivering chemotherapeutics directly into cancerous cells themselves is not only more potent, but also much safer. Drs. Peer and Margalit are working with ORUUS Pharma in California, which has licensed the “cluster bomb” platform from the university and can ensure a quick transition from the lab to clinical trials, which should begin in two years or less.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University are developing a new family of medicines that could provide preventive treatment for cancer, or turn existing cancer into a chronic disease that one can live with for years.

Details of the study, which was conducted in the laboratory of Dr. Ronit Satchi-Fainaro of the Physiology and Pharmacology Department in the Sackler School of Medicine, will be published in the September 2010 issue of FASEB Journal – the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

The study is based on the idea that doctors can prevent a cancerous tumor from growing bigger by damaging the process of angiogenesis – the formation of new blood vessels that provide the tumor with oxygen and nutrients.The researchers tested the efficacy of innovative polymeric carriers designed to deliver medicines directly to the cancer cells. In this way, the medicines do not harm healthy tissue and the amount of medicine required is significantly reduced, as are its side effects.

The carriers were developed by Dr. Ronit Satchi-Fainaro, Dr. Paula Ofek and colleagues at Berlin University. They were connected to a siRNA-type gene-suppressant and injected into laboratory mice with cancerous tumors. The results were very encouraging; the carriers took the siRNA directly to the cancer cells, and the compound passed through the cell walls and silenced the target genes, without causing the poisoning symptoms that usually accompany cancer treatments. The researchers now hope to do the same thing with siRNA that can silence a gene that plays a key role in angiogenesis.

Dr. Satchi-Fainaro said that this kind of treatment could revolutionize cancer therapy. People who are not sick but are at high risk of developing cancer – like former cancer patients or carriers of certain genetic mutations – will be able to receive preventive treatment. In people who have cancer, the medicines will keep the tumor in a state of “hibernation” and turn the cancer into a chronic disease that can be managed for many years, while maintaining a high quality of life.

The Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa has inaugurated an advanced laboratory for an innovative cancer treatment using nano-particles of gold, and laser beams.

The treatment is non-invasive, has no side effects and damages only the cancerous cell, without damaging the healthy cells that surround it.

The laboratory is located at the Laurie I. Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering, which was built in 2006 with major support of $30 million from philanthropist Lauri Lokey.

The cutting-edge research has stimulated interest both locally and on the international front, winning additional grants of two million euros from the European Union and more than $1 million from the Israel Science Foundation. Millions of dollars were invested to equip the new laboratory, headed by Nobel Laureate, Professor Aaron Ciechanover.

The multidisciplinary laboratory includes researchers from the fields of physics, optics, biology, engineering and biomedical nanotechnology and is currently engaged in a number of innovative projects, all of which are linked to advanced diagnostics and medical treatment.

Dr. Dvir Yelin, a researcher at the center explained the tumor is illuminated via an endoscopic laser-based miniature optical fiber. The laser has two parameters: one, it consists of very short pulses, at millions of billionths of a second that can break down the cell without heat; and two, the laser has a wavelength that precisely fits the resonant frequency of nano-particles, which makes it possible to highly increase the efficiency of the laser.

Under these conditions, the laser operates at a distance of nanometers (a millionth of a millimeter) from a nanoparticle, and creates sufficiently intense laser illumination to dismantle, through ionization, the material within the cancer cell, which then dies without damage to the surrounding healthy cells, he explained.

The treatment is relative to an equally cutting-edge diagnostic test recently developed by a research group headed by Hossam Haick, also at the Technion, in which a breath test using an array of sensors based on gold nanoparticles is used to distinguish the breath of lung cancer patients from that of healthy individuals in an atmosphere of high humidity.

The team is working to develop an inexpensive and non-invasive diagnostic test for lung cancer based on the study, which was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.