(Nanowerk News) Cancer is a devastating disease that causes one in every four deaths in the USA.
To treat cancer, bio-engineers have imagined a variety of nanoparticles that can potentially deliver therapies directly to tumors. The challenge is to get these nanoparticles to all the cancer cells they need to treat, in sufficient amounts, without causing side-effects on healthy tissue.
This video presents the barriers nanoparticles need to overcome to reach tumor cells and current strategies being considered in research labs to help them along the way.
This overview is intended for a general audience and does not necessarily capture all the complexities that arise in cancer, please share your own thoughts, questions and ideas in the comments or by email to shauertATmit.edu .
This video was made possible with the support of Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia and the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.
Sabine Hauert is a Human Frontier Science Program Cross-Disciplinary Fellow.