From left, Margaret Billingsley, Emily Day, and Rachel Riley are shown working on one of their previous research studies, this one on cancer detection.
UD engineers lay groundwork for cutting-edge cancer drugs
Cancer treatments—from radiation to surgery to chemotherapy—are designed to remove or kill cancerous cells, but healthy cells often become collateral damage in the process. What if you could use lasers to pinpoint the treatment area and deliver medicine to cancer cells only? A research team at the University of Delaware, led by Emily Day, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, is laying the groundwork for a method to inhibit cancer-promoting genes in cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact. In a new paper published in Nano Letters, the team reveals unprecedented insights into this promising method, which involves coating nanoparticles with gene-regulatory agents and then exposing them to a dose of laser light to unleash that material. Because the nanoparticles hold the gene regulatory agents inactive until their release is triggered on-demand with light, they have substantial potential to enable high precision cancer therapy while minimizing impact to non-irradiated healthy cells.