Scientists in Sweden have developed a nanoscale DNA weapon that may be able to cure cancerous tumors in humans.
Knewz.com has learned that said weapon is an innovation that activates cells’ “death receptors” when they come into contact making it a promising treatment for malignant tumors.
Where the study breaks new ground is; unlike previous forays into this sphere, scientists in the Sweden Karolinska Institutet were able to find these weaponized cells’ “kill switches”.
During a previous breakthrough, said institution was able to develop robots made of amino acids which via means of injection, were the bearers of said death receptors, per Nature Nanotechnology.
Study author, Professor Björn Högberg explained that “this hexagonal nanopattern of peptides becomes a lethal weapon.”
“If you were to administer it as a drug, it would indiscriminately start killing cells in the body, which would not be good. To get around this problem, we have hidden the weapon inside a nanostructure built from DNA.”
Högberg and his team who have been involved in the business of building minuscule DNA structures – also known as DNA origami – have now combined DNA and peptides to produce the “kill switch” necessary to prevent the microscopic robots from killing cells at random.
Through the exercise, they were able to manipulate the DNA structures to track down killing cancerous cells only.
“We have managed to hide the weapon in such a way that it can only be exposed in the environment found in and around a solid tumor. This means that we have created a type of nanorobot that can specifically target and kill cancer cells,” Högberg said via News Medical Life Sciences.
The potential treatment has already been tested on mice with breast cancer tumors and the rodents had a 70% reduction rate.
The technology is yet to be used on humans. Professor Yang Wang from the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics’s Karolinska Institutet who co-authored the study said:
“We now need to investigate whether this works in more advanced cancer models that more closely resemble the real human disease.”
“We also need to find out what side effects the method has before it can be tested on humans,” per News Medical Life Sciences.
The secret to successfully manipulating this is this acidity. The paper explains that most parts of the human have a relatively high acidity of at least 7.4 on the pH scale.
The pH around tumors, however, is only slightly acidic and the nanobots were noted to become active and start killing cells at acidity levels of 6.5 and lower.
News Medical Life Sciences noted that the researchers planned on furthering their studies and placing certain proteins and peptides on said nanorobots to see if they would be drawn to specific kinds of cancer.