Enterprise Partners to Evaluate Projects Developed by Cancer Nanotechnology Center to Be Established at UCSD 10/6/05

October 6, 2005

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), $3.9 million in the first year of a five-year $20 million initiative to establish a Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNE).
The center will use nanotechnology to develop targeted anti-cancer therapies, specifically for leukemia and breast cancer. The work will also focus on developing improved diagnostics and ways to pinpoint cancer cells that survive therapy.

Sadik Esener, PhD, professor of electrical and computer engineering, principal investigator, CCNE, says nanotechnology will allow doctors to deliver many new anti-cancer treatments to the exact positions in the body where they are needed. Nanotechnology will also enable doctors to get faster, less invasive feedback on the effectiveness of treatment, and would require smaller tissue samples when biopsies are needed for analysis, he says.

The focus of the UCSD team will be to develop "mother ships," smart nanoplatforms capable of homing in on tumors and delivering payloads of smaller particles to perform various tasks in the tumors. About the size of a red blood cell, these micron-sized nanoporous mother ships would move through the body and target specific tumor cells or the blood vessels that feed them. After arriving at their destinations, the mother ships would release their payload of nanoparticles, which could be designed to help image tumors, enter cells and perform measurements, and deliver therapies.

Chemists at UCSD together with materials scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, nanofabrication facility will synthesize nanoparticles that will be coated with "biolinkers," molecules developed at the Burnham Institute, La Jolla, Calif., to make the particles attach to specific types of tumor cells.

Six specific projects will be undertaken. One project will focus on the development of nanoparticles that move unimpeded through the blood, tissues, and organs, but clump together when they encounter tumor cells. Tumor-associated enzymes will trigger them to clump together, trapping the nanoparticles in the tumor but not in healthy tissue, which is expected to enhance their ability to capture energy from external radiation to either help produce images or kill the tumors selectively and noninvasively.

Other projects will focus on the design of nanoparticles that can go inside a cancer cell, extract themselves, and report what they find, as well as programmable particles whose target-binding properties can be set to find and kill tumor cells that survive anti-cancer therapy.

All technologies will be evaluated in animal models and representatives from General Electric Company, Honeywell, Irvine Sensors Corp., Nanogen, and Enterprise Partners Venture Capital will serve on a committee that will help identify inventions with commercial potential.

The other universities named by NCI as Centers for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence are: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta; Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Cambridge; Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.; California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.; and Washington University, St. Louis.

By Elizabeth Tolchin