Cardiff Nottingham and Padua Scientists manipulate the tumour environment to drive nanoparticle uptake into cancer cells

A collaboration between Nottingham University, the University of Padova, Italy, researchers at the Prof Arwyn Jones laboratory here in Pharmacy and Dr Pete Watson in the School of Biosciences have designed new targeting platforms for cancer cells.

The work has now been published in the RSC Journal Nanoscale.  The team partly funded by the EPSRC have designed and characterised nanoparticles targeting a cell surface receptor that is up regulated on cancer cells. The nanoparticles attach to the folate receptor on the surface of cells specifically at the low pH that is often associated with the tumour environment.

The researchers hope to use this technology to design new nanoparticle drug platforms to target cancer cells and improve current cancer therapy

Prof Jones said "Through the Erasmus scheme we hosted a very gifted PhD student from Padova who made use of the experience we have in cellular delivery of nanoparticles using confocal microscopy. We now hope we can continue to work together to load these particles with anti-cancer drugs giving us new therapeutic candidates for further development".

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/nr/c7nr02595e#!divAbstract