Integrated Nanotechnology and Biomedical Sciences Laboratory

Many researchers are developing drugs for the treatment of cancer. These drugs are administered in to the body and they kill cancer cells as well as healthy cells because the drug can go all over the body. This leads to excruciating side effects. Nanotechnology involves the use and design of structures, particles, or materials that have at least one dimensions smaller than 100 nm. Many researchers and companies are developing strategies to package drugs into a nanotechnology that can be further engineered to target and release the drug at the cancer cells in the body. The successful achievement of this would lead to increased therapeutic outcome and reduce side effects. The Chan group's research showed that 7 out of 1000 administered nanotechnology can target the solid tumour, 3 out of 100,000 can reach the cancer cells, and only 2 out of 100 cancer cells will be targeted by the nanotechnology. Thus, the delivery efficiency to each of the cancer components is low because the body is a hostile environment with biological traps such as the liver that removes the nanotechnology and prevents them from targeting cancer cells. With the funding from the CIHR Foundation grant, the Chan lab is aiming to solve the problem of delivery for nanotechnology. This will be achieved by studying how the nanotechnology interacts with each of the biological traps. These studies will allow us to develop a blueprint to build a nanotechnology that can escape them and identify strategies to increase the delivery efficiency to greater than 10% in the solid tumour. We will finally correlate the delivery efficiency with therapeutic outcome and side effects. Beyond seven-years, we will examine the optimized strategy derived from this study in human patients. The outcome of this research will create a pipeline of nanotechnology for treating patients with cancer.