The research team led by Park Suk-ho (Park Suk-ho), a professor from Chonnam National University (Chonnam National University), South Korea, has developed technology to turn white blood cells into 20-micrometer robots capable of independently detecting cancer cells and purposefully perform certain actions in relation to them. Such micro-robots, which are the first of their kind in the world, can effectively fight all solid cancers, including colon, stomach, breast, liver and pancreatic cancers.
Using the aggressive nature of leukocytes, the macrophages that are part of the body’s immune system, scientists forced them to “gobble up” large amounts of nanoparticles filled with an anticancer therapeutic drug. Thus, white blood cells have become a means of targeted drug delivery, which raises the effectiveness of this drug many times over.
It should be noted that there are other methods of targeted drug delivery to cancer cells using nanoparticles. But in other methods, nanoparticles are injected into the bloodstream and travel within the body along the path of the bloodstream, which reduces the percentage of nanoparticles that manage to successfully reach their destination.
However, the new delivery method also has a number of problems. The main one is that the drug molecules, as before, cannot penetrate into the inner regions of the cancerous tumor, in the areas where the most intensive division of malignant cells takes place. This problem has been solved by using a certain number of magnetic nanoparticles, which, under the influence of an external magnetic field, send gobbled-up macrophages to any region of the malignant tumor. There the macrophage leukocytes do their job, kill the malignant cells and release drugs into the environment, affecting neighboring cells that managed to avoid the macrophage attack.
Thus, the use of immunocytes as micro-robots allows “killing two birds with one stone”. The new method provides both spot chemotherapy and immunotherapy for cancerous tumors simultaneously, and it represents one of the most effective methods of fighting cancer to date.