Tiny Trojan Horses 2

Tiny Trojan Horses 2

Liangliang Hao, Srivatsan Raghavan, Emilia Pulver and Sangeeta Bhatia

Koch Institute at MIT, Institute of Medical Engineering and Science, Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine

Pancreatic cancer is the only major cancer with a five-year relative survival rate in the single digits, in part because the desmoplastic stroma prevents drugs from reaching the pancreas. To help overcome that obstacle, we engineered nanoparticles that can penetrate deeply to attack the tumor cells specifically. The fluorescent nanoparticles are penetrating into three-dimensional spherical cluster of tumor cells called organoids mimicking the complex cellular component in real tumors. In this image, blue coloring shows the cell nuclei, green the cell membrane, and magenta the nanoparticles.

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