Guiding nanomaterials to tumors for breast cancer precision medicine: from tumor-targeting small-molecule discovery to targeted nanodrug delivery

摘要

Peptide-assisted delivery of cancer-killing gold nanorods can be customized to a patient's specific tumor receptors using bacteriophages. Drug formulations that incorporate tumor-recognizing molecules make chemotherapies safer and more effective. Chuanbin Mao from the University of Oklahoma, USA, and Zhejiang University, China, and colleagues have shown that phages can automatically select optimal peptides for this approach. The team injected libraries with billions of phages into mice carrying breast cancer cells, and extracted those which bound most strongly to tumors after 1 hour. These biomolecules were then used as inputs for another round of testing, and, after five sequences of ‘biopanning’, phages with the highest tumor affinity emerged. Adding phage-selected peptides to gold nanorods improved drug uptake by 63% compared to a control group, and enabled subsequent laser treatment to destroy tumors at power densities safe enough for normal tissue.