A nanosystem for tumor treatment and imaging

描述（由申请人提供）：转移性癌症带来了巨大的治疗挑战。这项应用是基于我们努力开发新技术来治疗侵袭性和转移性癌症。我们开发了一种治疗胶质母细胞瘤（GMB）的方法，该方法在肿瘤的弥漫性侵袭性方面与人类疾病非常相似。治疗方式是一种新型的纳米系统，我们已经使用它来控制这些肿瘤。该纳米系统由一种促凋亡肽组成，通过将其偶联到纳米颗粒表面而变得非常有效，纳米颗粒通过肿瘤归巢肽引导到肿瘤。这种归巢肽还导致颗粒内化到靶细胞中。它还具有将有效载荷递送至线粒体的独特性质，线粒体是促凋亡肽的靶标。此外，氧化铁组分用作MRI造影剂。在GBM模型中，在许多其他尝试治疗完全失败的情况下，实现了有希望的治疗结果。最近，我们已经证明乳腺癌也是纳米系统的一个很好的靶点。GBM和乳腺癌的结果都提出了一个令人困惑的悖论，即虽然我们能够破坏大多数传统的肿瘤血管，但小鼠最终在侵袭性肿瘤模型中死于疾病。初步结果表明，经过治疗的肿瘤形成了某种替代循环，使它们对纳米系统的进一步治疗具有抵抗力。我们建议确定这种替代流通的特点，并制定将其作为销毁目标的方法。这些研究将增加对肿瘤如何在破坏传统肿瘤血管的抗血管生成和血管破坏治疗中存活的理解。研究结果还可能产生更有效的癌症治疗方法，包括对所有现有治疗方法基本上具有抗性的癌症类型。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Metastatic cancer poses a formidable treatment challenge. This application is based on our efforts to develop new technology to deal with treatment of invasive and metastatic cancer. We developed a treatment of glioblastomas (GMBs) that closely mimic the human disease with regard to the diffuse invasiveness of the tumors. The treatment modality is a novel nanosystem we have used to obtain an impressive degree of control over these tumors. The nanosystem consists of a pro-apoptotic peptide made highly potent by coupling it to the surface of nanoparticles, which are guided to the tumors by a tumor-homing peptide. This homing peptide also causes internalization of the particles into the target cells. It further has the unique property of delivering the payload to the mitochondria, which are the target of the pro-apoptotic peptide. Additionally, the iron oxide component served as an MRI contrast agent. The promising treatment results were achieved in the face of a complete failure of a number of other attempted treatments in the GBM models. More recently, we have shown that breast cancer is also a good target for the nanosystem. Both the GBM and breast cancer results have brought up the puzzling paradox that while we are able to destroy most of the conventional tumor vasculature, the mice ultimately succumb to the disease in the aggressive tumor models. Preliminary results suggest that the treated tumors develop some kind of alternative circulation that makes them resistant to further treatment with the nanosystem. We propose to characterize this alternative circulation and develop ways of targeting it for destruction. These studies will increase the understanding of how tumors survive anti-angiogenic and vascular disrupting treatments that destroy the conventional tumor vasculature. The results may also yield more efficacious treatments for cancers, including cancer types that are essentially resistant to all currently available treatments.