A research team led by Professor Jun-oh Jin of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yeungnam University has developed a new type of cancer treatment that mimics E. coli. It is attracting attention by presenting a new concept of treatment method that can block metastasis and recurrence of cancer through primary cancer treatment.
More than 90% of cancer patients die from recurrence and metastasis. Although local treatments such as surgery, chemical therapy, and photothermal therapy are used to treat cancer, hidden cancer cells recur after treatment or metastasize through blood vessels to cause cancer in other tissues.
As an alternative, ‘immune cancer treatment’, a method of inducing the death of cancer cells by using the body’s immune cell activity, is receiving attention recently. Immunotherapy is a cancer treatment that can selectively kill cancer cells without side effects by inducing specific immune activity against cancer antigens.
The research team manufactured ‘E. coli-like gold nanorods (ECA)’ by coating ‘FimH’, an E. coli adhesion protein with immune activation ability, on gold nanorods used for photothermal therapy. By administering ‘ECA’ to the tumor site and irradiating it with a laser, only tumor cells were selectively killed. At this time, it was confirmed that cancer antigen-specific immune activity was induced by the cancer antigen released during the cancer cell death process and FimH, an immune activator released from ECA, and with the effect, it was confirmed that metastasis and the growth of recurrent cancer were completely blocked.
Professor Jun-oh Jin said, “In this study, we developed a photothermal immunotherapeutic agent that contains both a photothermal agent for photothermal treatment and an immune activator that can activate immune cells in the body with E. coli-mimicking gold nanorods. This photothermal immunotherapeutic agent will be applied to cancers that can be treated with light such as melanoma or breast cancer, and will be able to completely block metastasis or recurrence of cancer through treatment of primary cancer.”
The research team plans to develop a photothermal immunotherapeutic agent containing cancer antigens that can be used in a wide variety of cancer types in the future to develop nanomaterials that can treat primary cancer and prevent metastatic and recurrent cancers at the same time.
In this study, researcher Joo-young Hwang (Ph.D. completion) from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yeungnam University Graduate School participated as the first author and Professor Jun-oh Jin participated as the corresponding author. This was carried out with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea for the Outstanding New Researchers Project. The research results were published online in ‘ACS Nano’, a world-renowned scientific journal in the field of nanoscience.
By Jeong Jae-hoon, staff reporter [email protected]