Improving Cisplatin with Nanoparticles One of the first
chemotherapy drugs given to patients diagnosed with cancer —
especially lung, ovarian, or breast cancer — is cisplatin, a
platinum-containing compound that binds to tumor cells' DNA.
Cisplatin does a good job of killing those tumor cells, but it
can also seriously damage the kidneys, which receive high doses
of cisplatin because they filter the blood. Now a team of
scientists at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and
Technology (HST) has come up with a new way to package cisplatin
into nanoparticles that are too big to enter the kidneys. Tumors
in mice treated with the new cisplatin nanoparticle shrank to
half the size of those treated with traditional cisplatin, with
minimal side effects. The new compound could spare patients the
usual side effects and allow doctors to administer higher doses
of the drug, says Shiladitya Sengupta, leader of the research
team, which published its findings in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. D