The night Peter Saephanh was admitted to a hospital to begin treatment on what he later learned was foot cancer, his oncologist sat down in his hospital room and started crying.
She wept for him because she knew the pain the high school junior, now a third-year political science student, was about to undergo ““ an anguish that may soon become history, thanks to the technology of nanomachines and the efforts of two UCLA professors.
Jeffrey Zink, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Fuyu Tamanoi, a professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, used elements of nanotechnology to discover how to deliver medicine to specific cancer cells, thereby limiting the adverse effects of current treatment methods.
This new process can target problem cells and increase control of treatment, making it a viable alternative to chemotherapy, Zink and Tamanoi said.
The process, which utilizes the first-ever artificial nanomachine operating inside of a living human cell, centers on a particle 100 nanometers across that has a number of tubular pores lining its edges, said the researchers, both of whom work at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute. Inside each pore is a miniscule machine containing a cancer-fighting drug that, once activated, pushes the medicine out to its diseased surroundings.
“It’s like a honeycomb, and you can store drugs in it,” Tamanoi said.
In the experiment conducted by Tamanoi and Zink, the drug used was camptothecin, a compound from a tree in China that, like many cancer medications, is essentially insoluble in water.
Because the drug does not dissolve in water or blood, transport through the bloodstream to reach the diseased cells in chemotherapy is more difficult. Storing the drug in a nanomachine, the researchers said, brings the camptothecin directly to damaged tissue, so that it can kill nearby cancer cells through the process of programmed cell death.
This new method also allows for an on-demand activation of drug particles, which lets an outside source decide when to expel the drug and how much of it to release, Tamanoi said, comparing the controlled release to the use of a remote control.
“The idea is to release the drug at specific times and specific locations,” he said. “This is the holy grail of drug research. Everyone wants to do it.”
In their study, the activation source was a special light shined on the cancerous tissue being experimented on.
Tamanoi said that chemotherapy treats the patient’s entire body with the drug, which often leads to side effects such as hair falling out and blood problems. His new treatment avoids this problem by localizing the medicine to specific damaged cells.
“This is totally different from current therapy,” he said. “And something different needs to be done.”
Saephanh knows firsthand how painful the treatment process can be.
In late 2003, he noticed a large growth on the bottom of his foot.
When he found out that it was a malignant tumor, he was forced to undergo several agonizing bouts of chemotherapy.
“They basically find how much of the chemical will kill you, and then they take it down one notch,” said Saephanh, who now serves as the president of UCLA’s chapter of Colleges Against Cancer. “It was a miserable process.”
Even after his treatment was completed, its side effects stayed with him. He remained fatigued and weak for weeks and felt a huge emotional toll after losing his hair.
“When you lose your hair, you become kind of ashamed,” Saephanh said. “I wore a baseball cap for a while.”
Though the researchers involved are excited about the prospect of eliminating such experiences, the process is still far from usable.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done to deliver these nanoparticles to the patients,” said Leonard Rome, the interim director of the institute, professor of biological chemistry and senior associate dean for research at the David Geffen School of Medicine. “Although I’m very optimistic, it’s just one step to doing this.”
The next measure to bringing this technology to the hospital is for it to undergo animal and then human clinical trials, which the researchers hope to start immediately.
If those prove the method successful, it will then be incorporated into NanoPacific Holdings, a company founded by the institute to use the professors’ inventions for biomedical applications, Zink said.
“We want to expand on this type of machine and other machines and use that to help people,” he added.
Assisting patients is exactly what this technology would do, Saephanh said.
“The reason why chemotherapy is so bad is because it goes throughout your entire body,” he said. “(Without it), I wouldn’t have suffered through all the pain that I had to. If nanoparticles can remove all those problems, then that’s a great idea.”