Chemotherapy often causes unwanted side effects by drugs being delivered throughout the body, rather than just targeting the cancer. Researchers at the University of Bristol are exploring how smart delivery vehicles  (nanoparticles) could be used to treat a variety of cancers, from leukaemia to brain tumours, by carrying drugs directly to the cancer while avoiding the surrounding healthy cells. 

The University of Bristol provides a unique crossdisciplinary environment that brings together clinical researchers, chemists bioethicists, biologists and engineers to design the nanoparticles of tomorrow. For example, Sabine Hauert is Associate Professor in Swarm Engineering; is a ‘swarm engineer’; her group builds new computational models to understand the behaviour of trillions of nanoparticles in the body when their design is subtly changed.

There are many ways to design nanoparticles, some with molecules to recognise cancer cells, some using materials that react to lasers or magnetic fields to release anti-cancer drugs or heat to kill cancer cells. Nanoparticles could potentially be made specific for different tumour types, offering new therapeutic avenues. Nanoparticles can also “light-up” in various ways, which is helpful to locate cancers in a noninvasive way, or to assess the response to treatment.

Dr Hauert’s models are helping clinicians in Bristol understand which nanoparticle designs will give rise to the most effective treatments, for example, by making sure that all the cancer cells in a tumour receive the optimal drug dose. Data generated from these simulations are currently being used in conjunction with machine learning to automatically design nanoparticles for different tumour scenarios. Her team is currently building a tumour-on-a-chip
device using 3D printing to test her models using real nanoparticles under the microscope. She is also working with bioethicists to understand what the first in-human clinical trials of nanoswarms for cancer treatment might look like.

http://hauertlab.com

Publications:

• Swana MC, Blee J, Stillman N, Ives JCS and Hauert S (2022). Swarms: The Next Frontier for Cancer Nanomedicine. In: Balaz I & Adamatzky A (eds) Cancer, Complexity, Computation. Springer Nature, pp269-288.
• McCormick SC et al. (2021). Measuring nanoparticle penetration through bio-mimetic gels. International Journal of Nanomedicine. 
• Stillman NR et al. (2021). Evolutionary computational platform for the automatic discovery of nanocarriers for cancer treatment. NPJ Computational Materials.