Therapeutics must navigate a maze of more than 100 billion densely packed cells to treat diseases of the brain, such as brain cancer. The Hammond Lab is designing nanoparticle drug carriers that can pass through the tiny gaps between these cells to reach as many cancer cells as possible while minimizing interactions with healthy cells to reduce toxicity.

In this image, the nuclei of brain tumor cells are shown in blue, with the cell bodies of a subset of glial-like cancer cells shown in green. The nanoparticles, shown in red, can be seen to travel a tortuous path through the dense cellular environment to maximize coverage of the tumor.