A smarter way to deliver drugs

摘要

In today's drug treatments for cancer, the drug spreads throughout the body indiscriminately. Along the way it causes side-effects such as nausea and hair loss.To tackle this problem, Georgina Such at the University of Melbourne imagines a miniscule capsule designed like a set of Russian babushka dolls. The capsule sneaks through thebloodstream untouched. When it finds its target - a cancer cell -it passes into the cell, sheds a layer, finds the part of the cellular machinery it needs to attack, sheds another layer and releases its cargo of drugs, destroying the cancer cell and only the cancer cell. Creating such a capsule may take decades, but Dr Such and her colleagues have already developed several potentially effective materials. Now, with the help of a $20 000 L'Oreal Australia For Women in Science Fellowship, she plans to go further.