The cure for cancer may not be so far off after all.

Biomedical engineering professor Dean Ho and his research team at Northwestern are currently developing a procedure more effective than chemotherapy and radiology. They are the first to use nanodiamonds – the familiar diamond structure on a nano scale – as a carrier for drugs needed for cancer treatment.

“If you keep blasting the body with high amounts of chemo, you know a lot of it isn’t going to work in the right places already,” said Ho, a, member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Feinberg School of Medicine.

Using chemotherapy means releasing drugs into the body that kill all the cells – cancerous or not – that they encounter. However, nanodiamonds are engineered to keep the drugs inactive until the diamonds sense a cancerous trait within its surrounding cells.

“We’ve been able to adsorb or stick a variety of drug types onto the surface of these diamond particles,” Ho said. “And then these particles stick to each other, so now you have drugs that are trapped amidst these clusters of diamonds. Now that you have this trapped drug, you can slowly deliver it in a sustained fashion.”

Researchers can then employ many different triggers to allow nanodiamonds to recognize cancerous cells through their unique markers, such as protein.

“In the membrane of cancer cells there are proteins that will significantly increase in number versus a healthy cell,” Ho said. “So, you can add an element onto the surface of the diamond that is the analog for that upregulated protein.”

In addition, cancerous cells also have an altered pH level in their surrounding areas, meaning they emit chemicals that healthy cells don’t, Ho said.

“So it’s about engineering as many … integrated sensing methods as possible so that (the process) is targeted, specialized, and localized,” he said.

Due to their flexibility, nanodiamonds may be carriers for an array of drugs that can be used for anything from treating tuberculosis to anti-viral delivery to tumor treatment.

“I work with chemotherapeutic drugs,” said Daniel Heiferman, a Weinberg junior and pancreatic cancer research assistant at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. “So to see the problems with that, and to see them create some of the solutions, (the research) seems really interesting,”

The current concern, then, is what effects the bare nanodiamonds have on the body, Ho said.

According to Ho, the diamonds have proven to be inert, and so far, the bare diamonds do not react with cells in the body. However, the research team plans to experiment on both animal and cancer models to survey the effects nanodiamonds might have on the body’s organs, Ho said.

In the meantime, the team is speaking with clinicians from multiple disciplines in order to design the diamonds so they will fit with the drugs that are currently needed.

“It’s not just about making a diamond and just trying to give off drugs,” Ho said. “It’s about … what are the drugs that are important, how big are these drugs, (and) how often are patients administered these drugs.”

“This is definitely new and innovative,” said John Lin, a McCormick freshman and biomedical engineering major. “It’s a new area of medicine and it has definite potential to become a major field in the future.”

A detailed report of the study was published by Nano Letters, an online nanoscience and nanotechnology journal. Ho co-authored the report with Houjin Huang and Erik Pierstorff of the NU Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering Departments, and Eiji Osawa of the NanoCarbon Research Institute.

Reach Sisi Wei at [email protected].