Buckyballs Boost Antibody’s Chemotherapy Payload
7/4/2006 Houston, TX staff Biocompare.com Nanoparticles could deliver multi-drug therapy to tumors In the ongoing search for better ways to target anticancer drugs to kill tumors without making people sick, researchers find that nanoparticles called buckyballs might be used to significantly boost the payload of drugs carried by tumor-targeting antibodies. In the ongoing search for better ways to target anticancer drugs to kill tumors without making people sick, researchers find that nanoparticles called buckyballs might be used to significantly boost the payload of drugs carried by tumor-targeting antibodies. In research due to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Chemical Communications, scientists at Rice University and The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center describe a method for creating a new class of anti-cancer compounds that contain both tumor-targeting antibodies and nanoparticles called buckyballs. Buckyballs are soccer ball-shaped molecules of pure carbon that can each be loaded with several molecules of anticancer drugs like Taxol®. In the new research, the scientists found they could load as many as 40 buckyballs into a single skin-cancer antibody called ZME-018. Antibodies are large proteins created by the immune system to target and attack diseased or invading cells. Previous work at M. D. Anderson has shown that ZME-018 can be used to deliver drugs directly into melanoma tumors, and work at Rice has shown that Taxol can be chemically attached to a buckyball. "The idea that we can potentially carry more than one Taxol per buckyball is exciting, but the real advantage [...]