Tricking cancer cells into taking drugs & improving drug delivery strategies for precision medicines

TheoryLab

In this episode, Ran Li, PhD, and Daniel Heller, PhD, discuss new advances in using nanoparticles to deliver drugs to cancer cells. Dr. Li was recently the first author of a paper in Nature Nanotech that described how cancer cells could be tricked into thinking they’re starved for nutrients, causing them to increase consumption of a cancer drug attached to the protein, albumin. Dr. Heller published a review earlier this year that “highlights recent progress in precision therapeutics and drug delivery, and identifies opportunities for strategies to improve the therapeutic index of cancer drugs and, consequently, clinical outcomes.” Ran Li, PhD, is an American Cancer Society – Ellison Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and Instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Daniel Heller, PhD, is Associate Member at Sloan Kettering Institute at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is a two-time American Cancer Society grantee, having received a Postdoctoral Fellowship and Research Scholar Grant. 0:58 – Dr. Li describes new findings published in Nature Nanotech, “Therapeutically reprogrammed nutrient signalling enhances nanoparticulate albumin bound drug uptake and efficacy in KRAS-mutant cancer:” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-021-00897-1 3:12 – Dr. Heller notes that “I’m a big fan of this paper and had my lab do a journal club on this,” and explains what he found exciting about it 5:46 –KRAS mutant cells are “ravenously thirsty,” making them susceptible to the approach taken by Dr. Li: “By tricking the cancer cells into thinking that they’ve been starved, they do more macropinocytosis, thereby taking more albumin-bound drug” 9:32 – “Do you think this could change how people use and prescribe this drug?” 11:50 – Dr. Heller shares some of the challenges and opportunities associated with nanoparticle drug delivery outlined in his review from earlier this year on targeted drug delivery strategies for precision medicines 16:34 – Dr. Li reacts… 18:29 – …and then asks, “What do you think a major hurdle is to bringing these novel drug delivery materials and technologies into the clinic?” 21:49 – On improvements that need to be made to nanomaterials in order to enhance precision medicine