Personalised nanomedicine for cancer therapy

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After decades of research, cancer is still one of the top killers responsible for almost 15% of the total death worldwide per year. One of the most critical limitation for cancer therapy is our inability to direct anticancer drugs to cancerous cells maximising killing and minimising side effects (often worse than the disease itself). This is due to the fact that cancer cells are the same healthy cells gone wrong and hence share many similarities with the good cells complicating detection and targeting. I propose here the engineering of ultra-small carriers (as small as a virus and 100 times smaller than cancer cells) that will be equipped with unique chemical signature to target almost exclusively cancer cells. These nanocarriers will also be able to carry a lot of drugs and deliver them right inside the cells where the drug is most effective. Once their job is done, the material that makes the carrier is dissolved into the same nutrients used by our body. Most importantly we will design nanocarriers using patient-derived tissues so to create a fully personalised targeting profile as well as a personalised drug dosage.