A new breakthrough in cancer diagnosis will now help in the identification and treatment of malignant tumours.
For the first time ever, scientists have shown that a hybrid nanomaterial based on magnetite-gold particles can serve as a universal platform to both detect cancer cells anywhere in the body and to complete targeted deliveries of drugs to these cells.
Made by an interdisciplinary Russian-German collaboration of chemists, physicists, and biologists from NUST MISIS, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University (RNRMU), and the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany), this platform will kill cancer cells.
The discovery makes it possible to create and implement a completely new generation of cancer treatments in the coming years.
The results of this fundamental research conducted at the intersection of physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine have been published in Scientific Reports, one of the most prestigious scientific journals.
If these pathogenic cells are tagged with magnetic nanoparticles, they can be diagnosed with the help of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and subsequently destroyed by either a drug or a magnetic field that heats and kills cancer cells.
One of the project participants, Maxim Abakumov, said, “We have managed to combine gold (Au) and magnetite (Fe3O4) nanoparticles into a hybrid that has both magnetic properties and is capable of carrying the drug [to a tumor]. It turned out as a kind of ‘nanodumbbell’ which could become a platform — a universal base — of future theranostics, and we have shown that in our research.”
Article Source : BS
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