Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

In nanoparticle cancer targeting, researchers decorate the surface of nano-scale drug carriers with molecules that can recognize cancer cells in the tumour. Although effective in the diagnosis and treatment in animal tumor models, only a small percentage of these designs actually makes it into the drug market for human. The reason behind the lack of success is because we don't have a comprehensive understanding of how many injected nanoparticles actually get to the cancer cells within the tumour. In this research we showed that even by decorating the surface of the nanoparticles with cancer cell recognition molecules, these nanoparticles do not end up at the cancer cells. Instead, most of the nanoparticles are residing in the tumour scaffold matrix. The implication of this finding is that we need to change our nanoparticle engineering strategies in order to better target tumour and increase clinical efficacy.