Breast cancer is one of the most widely studied cancers in
science today, but thousands of women still die from the disease
every year in the UK alone. There is an urgent need to develop
new therapies and treatments to further lower the mortality
rate. This paper from Laiqiang Huang and colleagues from
Tsinghua University, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center,
Dailan Medical University and the China Department of Materials
Science and Engineering presents a new chemotherapeutic agent
based on nanotechnology. The size and characteristics of
nanoparticles allow them to be used for passive and active drug
targeting in the body and are able to penetrate tumours to
deliver their drugs. The use of nanoparticles also mean that
drug localisation and release can be tightly controlled. They
can be made using biodegradable aliphatic polymers such as
poly(e-caprolactone) (PCL) and polyglycolide (PGA). These
compounds have recently been brought to the fore of research
into drug delivery systems as their properties of perm