A team of researchers from IISc have come up with nanomotors that can sense tumour and cancer cells at an earlier stage than is possible at present. A 3-D model of a tumour and magnetically-driven nanomotors was used by the researchers for the study, ‘Nanomotors Sense Local Physiochemical Heterogeneities in Tumour Microenvironments’.
Debayan Dasgupta, co-first author of the study and Ph.D. student at Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE), said, “We tried driving the nanomotors toward cancer cells in a tumour model and observed them getting stuck to the matrix near cancer cells, but this was not observed near normal cells.”
They had discovered that these nanomotors had gotten stuck at the tumour cell matrix due to sialic acids. “We searched for appropriate molecules within the vicinity of breast cancer cells and found specifically charged sugars known as 2,3-linked sialic acids. Normal breast cells show no such properties in the matrix close to them,” Ramray Bhat, Assistant Professor at the IISc Department of Molecular Reproduction, Development and Genetics (MRDG) told Indianexpress.com.
The study has also led the team to find how cancer cells change their environment within the organ in which they develop, in this case the breast. Notably, breast cancer is the most frequent kind of cancer affecting women all over the world, according to the WHO. The study also got published in Angewandte Chemie, a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the German Chemical Society.