Mauro Ferrari, the scientist who led the work at the Houston Methodist Research Institute in Texas, said that the results on mice are unprecedented and clinical trials on the first human patients could begin as early as next year, using a “nanoparticle generator” to improve the potency of existing anti-cancer drugs.
“To my very best understanding, this is the first case we’ve ever seen of a therapy with a well understood mechanism that can provide long-term, disease-free survival of our pre-clinical animal populations,” Dr Ferrari said.
“If this bears out in the clinical realm, even a short fraction in the preclinical experimentation that we did, it will be transformational. It will be the first ever demonstration of a cure of metastatic disease to the lungs,” he said.
The study, published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, used a standard chemotherapy drug called doxorubicin. However, it was the drug-delivery mechanism, using nanotechnology, that produced the stunning results, he said. Nanotechnology refers to the science of extremely small things, and the approach has recently seen major breakthroughs in an array of scientific fields.