Antibody fragment-nanoparticle therapeutic eradicates cancer

A novel cancer therapeutic, combining antibody fragments with molecularly engineered nanoparticles, permanently eradicated gastric cancer in treated mice, a multi-institutional team of researchers found.

The results of the "hit and run" drug delivery system, published in the March issue of Advanced Therapeutics, were the culmination of more than five years of collaboration between Cornell, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

"I've seen beautiful results before, but I've never seen something that eradicates a tumor like this," said study co-lead author Dr. Michelle Bradbury, MSKCC director of intraoperative imaging and professor of radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Targeted cancer treatments such as antibody and nanoparticle therapies have seen narrow clinical use because of each therapy's limitations, but the new therapeutic – an evolution of what the researchers call Cornell prime dots, or C' dots – combines the best attributes of both into an ultrasmall, powerfully effective system.

As silica nanoparticles just 6 nanometers in size, C' dots are small enough to penetrate tumors and safely pass through organs once injected into the body. Wiesner first developed them more than 15 years ago and, in collaboration with Bradbury, published a 2018 study that found an antibody fragment-nanoparticle hybrid to be especially effective in finding tumors.

This collaborative work with AstraZeneca set off the search for a new, molecularly engineered therapeutic version of this immuno-conjugate.

Image source: Ella Maru Studio/Provided, Cornell University.