Light-activated drugs offer precise strikes on tumours

The research findings by UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Jeffrey Zink, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Fuyu Tamanoi, a professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, and their colleagues appear online in Small.

Light-activated drug delivery holds promise for treating cancer because it give doctors control over precisely when and where in the body drugs are released.

Delivering and releasing chemotherapy drugs so that they hit only tumour cells and not surrounding healthy tissues can greatly reduce treatment side effects and increase the drugs’ cancer-killing effect but the development of a drug-delivery system that responds to tissue-penetrating light has remained challenging.

To address this, the teams of Tamanoi and Zink, which included scientists from the Jonsson Cancer Center’s cancer nanotechnology and signal transduction and therapeutics programs, collaborated with Jean-Olivier Durand from France’s University of Montpellier to develop a new type of nanoparticle that can absorb energy from tissue-penetrating light.