Calcium Phosphate Nanoparticles Deliver Chemo Agents

Calcium Phosphate Nanoparticles Deliver Chemo Agents
Can sneak hydrophobic compounds into cells

Calcium phosphate nanoparticles have the potential to act as cellular stealth bombers, delivering chemotherapeutic drugs or imaging agents to cancerous cells in a hydrophilic, bioresorbable package, researchers say.
We can take highly hydrophobic drugs and make them essentially water-soluble by packaging them within the calcium phosphate nanoparticle.—James H. Adair, PhD, Pennsylvania State University

The particles were shown to deliver the hydrophilic cancer drug ceramide in a number of cell models in a paper published last month in Nano Letters. (Kester M, Heakal Y, Fox T, et al. Calcium phosphate nanocomposite particles for in vitro imaging and encapsulated chemotherapeutic drug delivery to cancer cells. Nano Lett. 2008;8(12):4116-4121.)
“We can take highly hydrophobic drugs and make them essentially water-soluble by packaging them within the calcium phosphate nanoparticle,” said study author James H. Adair, PhD, a professor of materials science and engineering and director of the Particulate Materials Center at Pennsylvania State University.
“We’ve shown that we don’t cause any change in the biochemistry or biophysical chemistry in the cytosol when the calcium phosphate delivers its package,” Dr. Adair said in an interview with PFQ. The particles release their cargo and dissolve into calcium ions and phosphate ions, he said.
Dr. Adair said his colleague Mark Kester, PhD, a professor of pharmacology at Penn State, likened the technology to a stealth bomber. “The cells need calcium and phosphate; the calcium phosphate delivers the chemotherapeutic without the cell actually knowing what is inside the particle, so we deliver the chemotherapeutic very stealthily,” Dr. Adair said.
The next step in the research will be to show that the nanoparticles deliver their load specifically to the tissue of interest, cancerous lesions, Dr. Adair said. “This is something we’re currently working on and will be reporting in the next three or four months,” he said.