Nano-Treatment for Brain Tumors

As reported everywhere today, Sen. Ted Kennedy died Tuesday night after a year-plus fight with malignant glioma, a type of brain cancer. The condition, in which tumor cells arise from glia cells of the brain, is known to be especially deadly and hard to treat - only about 16 percent of patients diagnosed with the condition survive five years. Treatment involves radiation, surgery and chemotherapy, but long-term survival is a challenge.

“In some cancers, the brain or pancreatic cells are multiplying at such a rapid rate,” said Dr. Maciej Lesniak, director of neurosurgical oncology at the University of Chicago Brain Tumor Center.  ”When you have a cancer that grows that rapidly, the prognosis can usually be measured in months or years at most. It’s always a battle between how quickly the cancer is growing and the available therapies.”

Those grim numbers have inspired many researchers to look at improved ways of treating brain tumors, employing some of the latest technologies available in biomedicine. One promising tool, currently being tested by Lesniak and scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, is the use of nanomaterials to target and kill tumor cells with minimal damage to nearby healthy tissue. A laboratory demonstration of this method was published last month in the journal Nano Letters.

“This paper overcomes a potential challenge in nanomedicine,” Lesniak said. “While nanotechnology is very interesting in terms of applications, targeting nanoparticles to specific parts of the body is a problem. They are so small, they can go anywhere.” read more