Carbon nanotubes could be the key to better chemotherapy for cancer patients, Stanford University researchers have found.

A team including chemistry professor Hongjie Dai and graduate student Zhuang Liu showed that the tiny tubes can deliver drugs to tumor cells much more precisely than existing treatments. That means less of the harmful medication spills over into healthy cells, limiting collateral damage.

The breakthrough was published in the Aug. 15 issue of the journal Cancer Research.

The researchers worked with mice in which tumor cells had been proliferating for about two weeks. They injected some with a standard formulation of the chemotherapy drug Taxol, and others with a version in which the drugs were bound to nanotubes.

The technology takes advantage of the difference in porousness between the walls of healthy blood vessels and those found in tumor tissue. The nanotubes are sized and shaped to slip through the walls of the latter but not the former.

Indeed, the researchers reported that they got 10 times as much medication into the tumor cells using the nanotubes. After 22 days, the mice receiving the experimental treatment had tumors half the size of those treated with the basic Taxol.

If the same result holds in humans, doctors could achieve the same therapeutic effect of chemotherapy with much lower doses.

“We are definitely hoping to be able to push this to practical applications into the clinic,” Dai said. “This is one step forward. But it will still take time to truly prove the efficacy and the safety.”

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