Synergistic treatment of cancer with multidrug bottlebrush shaped nanoparticles

Amazing stuff! Cancer is history (soon)!

"... chemists have designed a bottlebrush-shaped nanoparticle that can be loaded with multiple drugs, in ratios that can be easily controlled. Using these particles, the researchers were able to calculate and then deliver the optimal ratio of three cancer drugs used to treat multiple myeloma. ...
This nanoparticle platform could potentially be deployed to deliver drug combinations against a variety of cancers, the researchers say. ...
Using nanoparticles to deliver cancer drugs allows the drugs to accumulate at the tumor site and reduces toxic side effects because the particles protect the drugs from being released prematurely. However, only a handful of nanoparticle drug formulations have received FDA approval to treat cancer, and only one of these particles carries more than one drug. ..."

From the abstract:

"Cancer therapies often have narrow therapeutic indexes and involve potentially suboptimal combinations due to the dissimilar physical properties of drug molecules. Nanomedicine platforms could address these challenges, but it remains unclear whether synergistic free-drug ratios translate to nanocarriers and whether nanocarriers with multiple drugs outperform mixtures of single-drug nanocarriers at the same dose. Here we report a bottlebrush prodrug (BPD) platform designed to answer these questions in the context of multiple myeloma therapy. We show that proteasome inhibitor (bortezomib)-based BPD monotherapy slows tumour progression in vivo and that mixtures of bortezomib, pomalidomide and dexamethasone BPDs exhibit in vitro synergistic, additive or antagonistic patterns, respectively, distinct from their corresponding free-drug counterparts. BPDs carrying a statistical mixture of three drugs in a synergistic ratio outperform the free-drug combination at the same ratio as well as a mixture of single-drug BPDs in the same ratio. Our results address unanswered questions in the field of nanomedicine, offering design principles for combination nanomedicines and strategies for improving current front-line monotherapies and combination therapies for multiple myeloma."

Targeting cancer with a multidrug nanoparticle | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Using bottlebrush-shaped particles, researchers can identify and deliver synergistic combinations of cancer drugs.

Molecular bottlebrush prodrugs as mono- and triplex combination therapies for multiple myeloma (no public access)

MIT chemists designed a bottlebrush-shaped nanoparticle that can be loaded with multiple drugs, in ratios that can be easily controlled.