Drugs can be delivered to the body in “nanocages” made of DNA fragments, a technology of the future that researchers at Canada’s McGill University have developed.
According to the Montreal-based McGill University on its website, the experiments used short DNA fibers and lipid molecules, which served as a kind of glue to create biological “cages” in the nanoscale, i.e. the size of atoms and molecules. A nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter.
According to the researchers at McGill, the possibility of creating such structures will bring new ways of delivering drugs to the body. It is possible to construct “nanocages” in such a way that they open only in the presence of specific nucleic acid sequences, i.e. those structures that store genetic information (such as DNA). Scientists believe that it will be possible to design cages of DNA fibers that will release the healing substance in the presence of, for example, cancer cells. According to them, this design of the drug delivery method has many advantages – the shape of the “nanocage” can be precisely developed and the cage itself is biodegradable.
Montreal researchers have already proved in their previous attempts that biological nanocages can be closed and opened – for these experiments, gold particles were used as a charge delivered in a package with DNA.
Professor Hanadi Sleiman and a group of scientists at McGill are currently trying to use DNA nanocage technology to treat leukemia and prostate cancer.
An article describing the research of Professor Sleiman’s group has just appeared in Nature Chemistry.
The idea of creating a “swallow doctor” is 54 years old. He appeared in the famous lecture by physicist Richard Feynman entitled “There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom” (there’s still plenty of room down there). Feynman considered in this lecture, which is believed to be a harbinger of nanotechnology, the possibility of manipulating matter at the atomic level. He also assumed that it was possible to create nanoscale machines, composed of such atoms as needed in a given case. Feynman told in this lecture, among others on the idea of his friend Albert Hibbs on surgical nanobots: “You introduce a mechanical surgeon into a blood vessel and he goes to the heart and looks around there (…) Finds which valve is faulty, takes out a miniature scalpel and operates on it. Other kinds of miniature machines could be permanently inserted into the body to assist the malfunctioning organs. ‘ (PAP)