Injectable nanodevices could provide effective treatment for drug-resistant glioblastoma
The brain cancer glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive and treatment-resistant cancers known to medicine, carrying a median survival of just 12-15 months, even with the best available care.
“In laboratory and animal studies, this approach significantly reduced tumor growth and extended survival without detectable side effects, highlighting its potential as a precise and safe brain cancer therapy,” says Deblina Sarkar , associate professor and AT&T Career Development Chair at the MIT Media Lab and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek group .
The researchers named their technology “HITMAN” — short for highly-localized electric-field-induced tumor therapy using magnetically actuated nanoantennas.
An open-access paper describing this technology published today in Science Advances .
To test HITMAN against the most clinically realistic version of this disease, the research team worked with tumor tissue obtained from patients diagnosed with aggressive and chemotherapy-resistant glioblastoma at Mayo Clinic. Using cells derived from this tissue in the laboratory, the researchers demonstrated that HITMAN eliminated 52.2 percent of these drug-resistant cancer cells — more than five times than that achieved by the standard chemotherapy drug temozolomide (TMZ) — while leaving healthy neurons and brain-supporting astrocytes unharmed.
The team then implanted those patient-derived tumor cells into the brains of mice to recreate the disease in a living system. In these orthotopic animal models — widely regarded as the gold standard for preclinical brain tumor research — HITMAN substantially inhibited tumor growth, extending median survival by more than 50 percent with no detectable toxicity to major organs or surrounding healthy tissue.