Improving chemotherapy using nanocapsules

– Aviral Sood

Image: Sreeranjini Pulakkat

Cancers are notoriously difficult to treat because they involve the body’s own cells mutating and dividing uncontrollably. These mutations can build up over time and change the behaviour of cancer cells, reducing the effectiveness of existing treatment methods.

For example, chemotherapy can potentially increase drug resistance in cancer cells, and lead to mutations causing an increase in the number of cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) and increased transition of epithelial to mesenchymal cells (EMT). This allows solid tumours to grow faster, become malignant, and then spread to other parts of the body.

To address this problem, researchers led by Ashok Raichur at the Department of Materials Engineering and Annapoorni Rangarajan at the Department of Developmental Biology and Genetics, IISc, have been working on more efficient and targeted chemotherapeutic drug delivery. In a recent study, they used polyelectrolyte nanocapsules made with biopolymers to deliver the anticancer drug Doxorubicin (Dox) to breast cancer cells in a lab dish. The drug is released only once the capsule enters the cancer cell, making its delivery highly specific.

The team found that cancer cells retained significantly higher quantities of Dox when it was delivered using these nanocapsules as opposed to traditional free delivery systems. Additionally, the biopolymer films lessened the undesirable effects of Dox on the cancer cell population. This reduced the rate of development of stem-like cells and EMT, leading to a more effective removal of the tumour. Such nanocapsules show potential to effectively deliver drugs to cancer cells without promoting drug resistance.

REFERENCE:
Pulakkat S, SB, Raichur AM, Rangarajan A, Enhancing chemosensitivity and reducing cancer stem-like cell population using doxorubicin-loaded polyelectrolyte nanocapsules, Journal of Drug Delivery Science and Technology (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jddst.2024.106494

LAB WEBSITES:
https://sites.google.com/view/raichur-group/home
https://sites.google.com/view/arlab-iisc/ar-lab