New therapy sees 25x increase of chemo drugs in ovarian cancer tumors using nanoparticle clusters

02/25/2014 - 00:00

Ovarian cancer accounts for more deaths of American women than any other cancer of the female reproductive system. According to the American Cancer Society, one in 72 American women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and one in 100 will ultimately die of the condition.

Now Prof. Dan Peer of Tel Aviv University's Department of Cell Research and Immunology has proposed a new strategy to tackle an aggressive subtype of ovarian cancer using a new nanoscale drug-delivery system designed to target specific cancer cells. He and his team – Keren Cohen and Rafi Emmanuel from Peer's Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Einat Kisin-Finfer and Doron Shabbat, from TAU's Department of Chemistry – have devised a cluster of nanoparticles called gagomers, made of fats and coated with a kind of polysugar. When filled with chemotherapy drugs, these clusters accumulate in tumors, producing dramatically therapeutic benefits.

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