Karen Aboody at City of Hope is already an expert at engineering stem cells to treat cancer. She has a grant from CIRM to develop a way of getting stem cells to deliver chemotherapy directly to tumor cells in the brain, sparing the surrounding tissue.

Now, she’s published a new paper showing that neural stem cells containing tiny gold nanorods can deliver a form of heat therapy to breast tumors. The work was published in Advanced Healthcare Materials.

City of Hope described the work like this:

There’s much to like about gold, therapeutically speaking. Gold is nontoxic, and gold nanoparticle rods are relatively easy to make. Most important, the rods vibrate at a certain frequency, which turns them into tiny antennae.

This frequency allows physicians to use a special  laser that targets only those spots where the nanorods are vibrating – leaving the healthy tissue unharmed.

They say that the technique could also be effective in other types of cancer like bladder or ovarian tumors.

CIRM funding: Rachael Mooney (TG2-01150)

A.A.

Schnarr K, Mooney R, Weng Y, Zhao D, Garcia E, Armstrong B, Annala AJ, Kim SU, Aboody KS, & Berlin JM (2013). Gold Nanoparticle-Loaded Neural Stem Cells for Photothermal Ablation of Cancer. Advanced healthcare materials PMID: 23592703