Nanodiamonds Advance Anticancer Gene Therapy

Technology.am (Sept. 27, 2009) — Researchers have developed a versatile nanotechnology-enabled platform, a scalable system for delivering genes to cells both efficiently and safely into cancer cells. The delivery efficiency was 70 times greater than that of a conventional standard for gene delivery.

In one study, a team of Northwestern University researchers has shown that nanodiamonds can serve as a novel gene delivery technology that combines key enhanced delivery efficiency along with outstanding biocompatibility, all in one drug delivery package.

Dr. Dean Ho, a lead researcher and his research team engineered surface-modified nanodiamond particles that successfully and efficiently delivered DNA into mammalian cells.

The Northwestern researchers were able to functionalizing the nanodiamond surface with a low-molecular-weight polymer known as PEI800. PEI800 is currently used in gene therapy clinical trials, and although it is biocompatible, it does not deliver DNA to cells with high efficiency.

The combination of PEI800 and nanodiamonds produced a 70-fold enhancement in delivery efficiency over PEI800 alone, and the biocompatibility of PEI800 was preserved. The process is highly scalable, which holds promise for translational capability.

The researchers used a human cervical cancer cell line called HeLa to test the efficiency of gene delivery using the functionalized nanodiamonds.

This experiment served as a demonstrative model of how specific disease-fighting DNA strands could be delivered to cells. The results of these experiments were published in the journal ACS Nano.

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