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Scientists at Rice University (Houston, United States) have invented a therapy to treat prostate cancer based on gold nanoparticles . Apparently very promising. Based on the results of a clinical trial conducted in 15 people, this new formula manages to destroy the tumor without the side effects of surgery and radiation.
A great hope that is still very preliminary, but exciting, especially for one of the architects of the invention, Naomi Halas, who remembers her father's words with emotion: "If you could prevent only one person from having to go through the hell I've been through , it would be worth it. "
He was 85 years old when he issued these words. It was one of 1.3 million new cases of prostate cancer that occur every year in the world. He knew his daughter's project, but at the time, this innovative treatment was only a proposal . It had not been tested in any patient because it had to be demonstrated first whether these nanoparticles could be used safely in humans. "From my father, I know a lot about what people go through with this tumor. Two years after he was given radiotherapy, he found it almost impossible to urinate. It was terrible . He went in and out of the hospital weekly. The doctor catheterized him. He was going to home and a few days later I had to go back to the emergency room ".
Halas remembers his father often asking him if his invention could be the answer to his illness. Now, with these first results of the small essay, published in the Proceedings of the National Acaedemy of Sciences (PNAS), the engineer is getting closer to being able to answer affirmatively.
How was the treatment
The 15 patients undergoing the new therapy received an intravenous infusion of the gold nanoparticles and at 24 hours underwent an image-guided ablation treatment. Immediately afterwards, they were able to go home without a problem and only had to return to the hospital for the planned follow-up tests at three months, at six and one year.
Only two continued to show signs of the tumor after treatment. But in the rest of the cases, "this therapy was able to treat prostate cancer by avoiding the side effects of conventional approaches, such as erectile dysfunction or urinary incontinence ," explains Ardeshir Rastinehad, the lead author of the research and associate professor of Urology and Radiology at the Icahn School of Medicine on Mount Sinai.
The trial, which is not yet over, has already treated 44 people at Mount Sinai and two other clinical centers in Michigan and Texas. It is the culmination of a search work that began 20 years ago when several engineers and nanoscientists from Rice and Duke University, one of them Naomi Halas, first considered the possibility of including nanoparticles in the treatment of this type of Cancer.
As she explains, they are tiny spheres of silica with an outer layer of gold that are approximately 50 times smaller than a red blood cell. In 1997, Halas showed that he could design these nanoparticles to interact with specific wavelengths of light. Three years later, she and West invented a method to destroy cancer cells by heating the nanoparticles with a low-power near infrared laser that can pass through healthy tissue without damaging it. For this work, they obtained national awards and coverage in the press and ended up co-founding a startup (Nanospectra Biosciences), with the aim of developing technology for clinical use. They verified that the system was capable of destroying cancer cells without side effects in cell cultures and in mice. They finally got the FDA test. "We achieved the first nanoparticle capable of entering human beings," West notes in the article. It was regulated as a medical device: Aurolase therapy.
Tropical Storm Allison
Ten years ago, clinical trials were conducted to verify its safety and then, this small trial was started to assess its effectiveness. This is an important step in a long journey of 20 years of research in which there have been obstacles to jump . "Tropical Storm Allison destroyed many MRI instruments at the facilities where we experimented with animals (in Texas)."
A moving path that culminates in the satisfaction of seeing how "our invention can one day help people with prostate cancer," says Halas, reminding his father that he died several years ago. At the moment, there are 13 cases that have responded well to the treatment, but "when are 16,000 or 15 million? The idea is that this work helps to alleviate the side effects that my father suffered."
However, we must not forget that it is a very small group of patients who are also very selected. That is, "they had the disease very localized and were classified as low and intermediate risk . In some cases," in clinical practice, attempts are made to avoid surgery and radiotherapy with ablative treatments, even to follow up very closely before doing anything " , explains Martín Lázaro Quintela, member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM), although the truth is that it is usual to deal with surgery and radiotherapy, and this new option is the result of collaboration between engineering and medicine He comes to propose a formula free of side effects such as urinary incontinence and impotence. However, "there are few patients and a one-year follow-up is very short . We will have to see how long-term effects are translated. "
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