'Cylindrical nanoparticles more effective for breast cancer'

Scientists have discovered cylindrical and worm-shaped nanoparticles are more effective than traditional spherical ones when delivering drugs to breast cancer cells.
Cylindrical-shaped nanoparticles are seven times deadlier on the breast cancer cells. Even better - the worm- shaped drug delivery vehicles are not more toxic to healthy cells according to a study conducted by an international team of researchers and recently published in 'Polymer Chemistry'.
In this study, different polymeric nanoparticle shapes (including spherical micelle, cylindrical micelle and vesicles) were investigated, and the preliminary results suggest shape plays an important role in the cell uptake and toxicity response, according to University of New South Wales (UNSW).

The project was co-led by researcher Cyrille Boyer of UNSW School of Chemical Engineering and Australian Centre for NanoMedicine and Thomas Davis from Monash University, and also involved Bunyamin Karagoz from Istanbul Technical University.
Developing nanoparticles to target drugs directly to specific regions of the body is a growing field of medicine, and these new results suggest changing the shape of nanoparticles could reduce treatment costs and side-effects.
"What we've discovered is that a different shaped nanoparticle can have a very different effect on cancer cells, even with the same amount of drug.

"However there is still a lot of work to do and we need to test the nanoparticles in vitro with a range of cancer cells," Boyer said.

Previously, research has overwhelmingly focused on spherical drug delivery systems as they are easier to make, but the new study also presents a simple and cheap way of creating three different nanoparticle shapes - spherical, vesicular and tubular or 'worm-like'.
The researchers are now looking into whether cylindrical- shaped nanoparticles also deliver drugs more efficiently to other types of cancers.