Treating pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer with gold nanoparticles

A multidisciplinary team of University of Porto - researchers from the Laboratório de Engenharia de Processos Ambiente e Energia  (LEPAE) of FEUP, the IBMC and IPATIMUP - together with researchers from Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), the University of Nebraska Medical Center (USA) and Institute for Cancer Research (Norway) studied, for three years, the use of gold nanoparticles as a way to treat cancer and concluded that they increase efficiency permeation of retention and penetrability of therapeutic drugs in tissue affected by the disease.

The researcher Sílvia Coelho, of Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto and first author of the study, explained to our website that «the drug (including the well-known «anti multi-drug resistance» (MDR) inpenetrates the nanoparticles and becomes much more potent, with much higher effects in tumor cells, that allows reduction of the usual dose, which is very strong, and obtain superior effects in tumor cells and, for reasons yet unclarified, without adverse effects on the non-tumor cells.»

Gold nanoparticles may be used in both chemotherapy and radiotherapy and have already been tested in pancreatic and prostate cancer cell lines and in cell lines derived from non-tumor tissues.

This treatment has triggered the interest of an investigator from Pfizer in the United States, with due to the possibility to be introduced in the pharmaceutical market, for the application of these nanoparticles in the passage of drug deliverys through the blood-brain barrier.
 

The project, which was funded by FCT (€ 140,000) and the Research Council of Norway (NK 180 000), was recently presented in the United States, in at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) conference and, according to the researcher who leads the project, Manuel Coelho, will be published within a month in the «Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology».

Image: Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto