Nanoparticles may help treat blood cancer

Nanoparticles may help treat blood cancer

Media Release - University of Auckland

A new therapeutic strategy for treating Acute Myeloid Leukaemia could involve using nano-particles to deliver a genetic molecule to fight the disease.

The nanoparticles carrying microRNA miR-22, (a small non-coding RNA molecule that regulates gene expression), showed therapeutic potential in mouse models of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML).

AML is a form of cancer of the blood cells which, despite intensive chemotherapy, is often fatal within one or two years from diagnosis.

The study was led by cancer researcher Professor Jianjun Chen at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and examined AML tumour samples from 62 human patients confirming that miR-22 expression is reduced in AML.

University of Auckland blood cancer researcher Professor Stefan Bohlander was one of 30 scientists involved in the recent study, published online in Nature Communications today.

He says no new drugs have been developed for AML in the last 30 to 40 years, so scientists are hoping to develop new therapeutic strategies.

“We were comparing the expression of genes in patients with short and long-term survival of AML and observed that the genetic molecule – miR-22 – is expressed at higher levels in long-term survival patients,” says Professor Bohlander.

“By encapsulating a drug or therapeutic agent such as miR-22 in nano-particles, we can ensure that the agent is delivered more effectively to the tumour cells we are looking to kill.”

“We are a long way from any clinical application of this research at the moment, but it is an interesting avenue and proof of concept that one might be able to use the body’s own regulatory molecules to treat blood cancer. This is quite a different strategy from using highly toxic chemotherapy,” says Professor Bohlander.

He says there is a need for sophisticated blood cancer models, like Zebrafish models, to test potential therapies in a larger complex organisms.

“These models are important to tease out whether and how the therapy might work in human patients,” says Professor Bohlander. “We are developing Zebrafish models, so that they can also be used to test and refine drugs that will deliver the therapy to a target area.”

“By encapsulating a drug or therapeutic agent such as miR-22 in nano-particles, we can ensure they are targeted to the tumour cells we are looking to kill and the drug does not get.”

He says the present study was based on data from hundreds of AML patients from Germany, the Netherlands and the USA whose data were collected over a period of up to 15 years.

“This is painstaking, long-term work that requires a lot of planning, the effort of many clinicians and researchers and, of course, patients who are willing to participate in clinical trials” says Professor Bohlander.

“We could not do this type of study without global collaborations because for example in New Zealand, out of a population of four million people, there are only about 100 new AML patients each year.”

“We are also pooling samples and building sample collections with our Australian colleagues,” he says. “Today’s publication shows the importance of leukaemia and cancer patients agreeing that researchers can use their tumor samples to enable studies like this.”

ENDS

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