By Admin at 16 Mar 2016, 12:44 PM

Chemotherapy is often the go-to treatment for a number of cancers, but despite its commonality it’s far from an exact science. Individual patients may respond differently to the same treatment, for instance, leaving health care providers in a quandary over how to best proceed.

A new discovery by researchers at Ohio State University may help shed light on how chemotherapy works in each patient, as they’ve developed a way to track the treatment in real time.

The researchers created a luminescent molecule (a peptide composed of two amino acids) that attaches to chemotherapy drugs and lights up upon entering cells. The invention shows much promise, as it’s made of natural amino acids that should be able to coexist with human cells and leave the body without causing harm.

While previous studies have attempted to create similar chemotherapy tracking systems, the dyes often faded too quickly or contained toxic compounds, such as metals.

The featured study was conducted in petri dishes, but the idea is that once in the body the luminescent molecules will light up the path of chemotherapy drugs in real time, revealing exactly where they go and how fast they get there. Study author Dr. Mingjun Zhang, a biomedical engineering professor, told Science Daily:

“This is very important for personalized medicine. We really want to see what's going on when we give chemo drugs and this work paves the way for the exciting endeavor.

… You can label it and you can attach it to a drug and see where the drug goes and when it is released … Maybe for some people a drug is taking effect in a few minutes and for somebody else it's hours and for somebody else it never takes effect.”

Personalized medicine is often said to represent the future of cancer treatment. In addition to one day offering more targeted, individualized chemotherapy regimens, personalized medicine may involve:

• Testing cancer to find out which treatments will be most effective
• Analyzing genetics to determine how a treatment will respond in an individual
• Looking for genetic mutations that may influence cancer risk or treatment response
  
  

In the case of chemotherapy, the newly created fluorescent peptide lights up under ultraviolet light and stays that way for extended periods, which could give health care providers a glimpse into chemotherapy’s actions unlike ever before. And this is just the beginning.

Related research is looking into ways to make tumor cells fluorescent, allowing surgeons to more easily detect the cancerous cells and remove all of them on their first attempt.

Sources
Nature Nanotechnology January 11, 2016
Science Daily January 14, 2016
American Cancer Society, Personalized Medicine

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