Get the latest tech news

Urease-powered nanobots for radionuclide bladder cancer therapy


Bladder cancer treatment suffers from low therapeutic efficacy. Here the authors present radioactive 131I-labelled urease-powered nanobots that exhibit enhanced accumulation at the tumour site, enabling effective radionuclide therapy at low doses as an alternative treatment option for bladder cancer.

We have previously shown that urease-powered nanobots based on mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNPs) display an enhanced motion, with propulsion resulting from an ionic gradient of ammonia and CO 2 created by the asymmetric decomposition of urea around the particle 22, 23, 24. Administering 18 F-nanobots in urea in non-tumour-bearing mice resulted in a negligible fraction (about 0.02% of the injected dose) of radioactivity being observed, indicating the low adherence and/or penetration capacity of the labelled nanobots in a healthy bladder (Fig. These results were validated by ICP-MS. Additionally, polarization control in sLS imaging confirmed the presence of nanobots throughout the entire bladder, enhancing their optical response into clearly visible foci that stood out against the tissue background signal.

Get the Android app

Or read this on r/tech

Read more on:

Photo of Urease

Urease

Photo of powered nanobots

powered nanobots