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Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have developed nanorobots that kill cancer cells in mice. The robot's weapon is hidden in a nanostructure and is exposed only in the tumor microenvironment, sparing healthy cells. The study is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology .
The research group at Karolinska Institutet has previously developed structures that can organize so-called death receptors on the surface of cells, leading to cell death. The structures exhibit six peptides (amino acid chains) assembled in a hexagonal pattern. "This hexagonal nanopattern of peptides becomes a lethal weapon," explains Professor Björn Högberg at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Karolinska Institutet, who led the study.
"If you were to administer it as a drug, it would indiscriminately start killing cells in the body, which would not be good. To get around this problem, we have hidden the weapon inside a nanostructure built from DNA." The art of building nanoscale structures using DNA as a building material is called DNA origami and is something Björn Högberg's research team has been working on for many years.
Now they have used the technique to create a 'kill switch' that is activated under the right conditions. We have managed to hide the weapon in such a way that it can only be exposed in the environment found in and around a solid tumor. This means that we have created a type of nanorobot that can specifically target and kill cancer cells.
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