Researchers at WSU have discovered a possible new way to kill cancerous tumors with nanotechnology, and they are working to make it viable as a standard treatment for humans with the disease.

Zhenjia Wang, WSU assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences, and his team have been working for the past two years on a new system to allow neutrophils, a type of white blood cell that fights cancer and other infections, to enter a tumor.

“Blood cells are like an automatic car on a highway … they circulate in the blood stream,” Wang said. “We guide the neutrophils to the tumor using an [infrared] light.

This technique causes inflammation in the tumor, Wang said, which leads to the release of proteins within the tumor. These proteins attract the neutrophils, which are small enough to migrate through the shield of blood vessels that typically protects a tumor.

At this point, as a method of cancer therapy, the neutrophils release nanoparticles implanted in them by Wang and his team, according to an article on their study in Advanced Materials Journal.

They tested this strategy on mice by injecting them with gold nanoparticles. The nanoparticles, combined with the infrared light, produced heat within the tumor. This heat led to the destruction of the cancerous tumor cells within the mice.

Current methods of cancer treatment target cancerous cells through chemotherapy. In the next five years, Wang said technology will have evolved to allow the use of nanotherapy in clinical settings to assist human patients.

“How can we translate our technology into the hospital?” Wang said this is the next step for their new delivery system, and he and his team are currently investigating how to do it.

With further development, therapists could attach anticancer drugs to the nanoparticles, according to a WSU News release. This could let them deliver the drugs directly to the tumor and avoid damaging nearby tissues.

“This will be applied to deliver many anticancer drugs,” Wang said in the release, “and we hope that it could increase the efficacy of cancer therapies compared to other delivery systems.”