“Brand new principles” of cancer therapy developed in Tomsk

Print 17 February 2016
Marchmont Innovation News

Researchers at Tomsk Polytechnic (TPU), a leading university in Siberia, working in partnership with their colleagues from the Siberian Institute of Physics of Strengths and Material Science (IPSMS) and international teams, claim to have found a new strategy to fight cancer by exposing cancerous cells to “hunger torture,” thus slowing down their growth and development. Special nanodimensional agents have been developed to do the job, the TPU website  announced . 

“We talk about brand new principles of impacting microorganisms and cells in a targeted manner,” the website underscored. 

According to Sergei Psakhie, the IPSMS director and head of the Medical Material Science lab at TPU, “we have been using nanotech products to suppress the growth of cancerous cells.” Impacting the cells with the scientists’ know-how, agents 200 nanometers in diameter and less than one nanometer thick, is said to have led to a virtual “famine” among the cells. The researcher added that “there’s a Russian patent on this, and we’re working with our foreign partners to secure an international patent.” 

For now, however, the team is not talking about the development of a new drug. 

“Commercializing a new drug is a very lengthy process that takes years. But we can use our solution as an addition to drugs that exist already. In their experiments our Slovenian colleagues used our anti-cancer agents as a supplementary factor in conventional widespread chemotherapy. They saw efficacy increase exponentially, making it possible to reduce the doses of their chemotherapeutic drug. We’re opening a networking center soon at TPU in collaboration with our project partners to further this research area,” Mr. Psakhie said. 

The results of their research  have been published  in Scientific Reports.

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