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Breakthrough in cancer treatment by Indian Scientists

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A group of Indian scientists from the esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School has made an important breakthrough by developing a nanotechnology that can be used for monitoring the effectiveness of immunotherapy for cancer patients. Using a nanoparticle that delivers a drug and then fluoresces green when cancer cells begin dying, researchers were able to visualise whether a tumour is resistant or susceptible to a particular treatment much sooner than currently available clinical methods.

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“We have developed a nanotechnology, which first delivers an anticancer drug specifically to the tumour, and if the tumour starts dying or regressing, it then starts lighting up the tumour in real time,” said ShiladityaSen Gupta, a principal investigator at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH).

“This way you can monitor whether chemotherapy is working or not in real time, and switch the patients to the right drug early on. One doesn’t need to wait for months while taking a toxic chemotherapy only to realise later and after side effects that the drug hasn’t worked,” Gupta, a co-corresponding author of the breakthrough research published online this week in ‘The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’, told PTI.

Ashish Kulkarni, first author of the paper who hails from a small village in Maharashtra said by using this approach, the cells light up the moment a cancer drug starts working. “We can determine if a cancer therapy is effective within hours of treatment. Our long-term goal is to find a way to monitor outcomes very early so that we don’t give a chemotherapy drug to patients who are not responding to it,” he said. “We’ve demonstrated that this technique can help us directly visualise and measure the responsiveness of tumours to both types of drugs,” Kulkarni added.

Other members of the research team are PoornimaRao, Siva Natarajana, Aaron Goldman, Venkata S Sabbisetti, Yashika Khater, Navya Korimerla, Vineeth krishna Chandrasekara and Raghunath A Mashelkar. Except Goldman, all are Indian researchers.

According to Kulkarni, current techniques based on measurements of the size or metabolic state of the tumour, sometimes fail to detect the effectiveness of an immunotherapeutic agent as the volume of the tumour may actually increase as immune cells begin to flood in to attack the tumour. Reporter nanoparticles, however, can give “us an accurate read out of whether or not cancer cells are dying”, he added.

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