A Medical Device Daily
A University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS; Little Rock) researcher on the cutting edge of nanotechnology has been awarded $2.3 million in three grants to further groundbreaking developments in the prevention of lethal cancer metastasis and take his team's findings to the first clinical trial of its kind. The three new grants recently awarded to Vladimir Zharov, PhD, director of the Phillips Classic Laser and Nanomedicine Laboratories at UAMS, are in addition to a $1.5 million National Cancer Institute grant he received in May.
Zharov said nanomedicine may eventually lead to breakthroughs in the early diagnosis and effective treatment of cancers, stroke, heart attack and infections, which remain the leading causes of death in the world.
The first grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (Bethesda, Maryland) is $1.2 million over four years and will support comprehensive preclinical studies and a first-of-its-kind clinical trial using nanoparticles at the UAMS Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute. It will help the Institute's world-renowned cancer experts explore a way to diagnose deadly breast cancer metastasis in its earliest stages.
About 90% of all cancer deaths result from metastasis, which is when cancer cells shed from the primary tumor and develop secondary tumors within the body's distant organs. The development of methods for finding, counting and killing these potentially deadly metastatic cells in both the blood and lymphatic systems should be considered one of the top priorities in cancer research, Zharov said. The long-term goal of these methods is to improve the survival rate in cancer patients.
Zharov and his team have developed hybrid multicolor gold and magnetic nanoparticles with a special biological coating that can target metastatic cells within the body once they have spread through the blood and lymph system. A laser is used to heat up those nanoparticles attached to metastatic cells without harmful effect on the body's healthy cells. Rapid expansion of nanoparticles in metastatic cells causes ultrasound waves, which travel through the tissue and are captured by a small ultrasound transducer held near the skin. In a preliminary study the technique was so sensitive that it was able to detect and count rare metastatic cells before they form distant metastases.
The second grant, a nearly $400,000 offering over two years from the National Cancer Institute (Rockville, Maryland) will focus on the role of stem cells in cancer development. Ekaterina Galanzha, Ph.D., an assistant professor collaborating with Zharov, said the challenges of current cancer treatment may be explained by a small subset of therapy-resistant and highly aggressive metastatic cancer cells called cancer stem cells. UAMS researchers hope to develop a method using nanoparticles for molecular identification of circulating cancer stem cells. If successful, Zharov hopes to create a new therapy for the targeted eradication of those cancer stem cells.
The third grant awarded to Zharov is for $700,000 over four years from the National Science Foundation (Arlington, Virginia) to develop high resolution laser nano-imaging of tiny structures in live single cells that can be used for both basic and clinical studies with a focus on the early diagnosis of abnormal processes responsible for cancer and aging.