Cancer treatments like chemotherapy often carry severe side effects that can be more debilitating than the disease for some, even though the treatment is required for survival in many cancer patients. In lieu of a cure for cancer, the best way to help improve life expectancy for cancer patients is to find better treatments while making the treatments induce less side effects for cancer sufferers.

One of the biggest areas of research is nanoparticles as a treatment and diagnostic tool for cancer. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found a new method of using nanoparticles to treat cancer and follow the growth or reduction in the size of tumors.

The researchers used nanoparticles described as tiny beads of an oily, inert substance able to be coated with a variety of active substances. The researchers coated the nanoparticles with a fungal toxin called fumagillin. Fumagillin has profound neurotoxic side effects at high doses when used as a cancer treatment by conventional methods.

The researchers were able to coat the nanoparticles with fumagillin in low doses and also coated the nanoparticles with molecules designed to stick to proteins primarily found in growing blood vessel cells. One of the most prolific sources of growing blood vessels in the body are cancerous tumors that have to grow their blood supply to be able to grow in size.

In clinical trials with rabbits, the fumagillin-coated nanoparticles were able to demonstrate an effective ability to reduce tumor size with no side effects for the rabbit. The researchers in the study also loaded the nanoparticles with a MRI contrast agent and were able to make detailed MRI maps of the tumor and its vasculature before and during treatment. Senior research author Gregory M. Lanza, M.D., Ph. D. said in a statement, “It [nanoparticles coated with MRI contrast] gives you a way of determining whether you should continue treatment, change the dose or even try a different treatment altogether."

Lanza also added, “What this report clearly demonstrates is that our nanoparticles can carry chemotherapeutic drugs specifically to tumors and have an effect at the tumor site. Sometimes when I give presentations about our nanotechnology, people react as if it was science fiction or at best a technology of the distant future. But we've shown that the technology is ready for medical applications now."

Lanza and his team aren’t the only researchers trying to treat cancer with nano devices. Researchers at UCLA are using tiny nanoimpellers in a similar method of treating cancer with low doses of medications directly in cancer cells.