Sugar Pills

Some medicines take the sledgehammer approach: destroy the disease, even if that means some collateral damage and a trail of chaos in the surrounding area. But the best treatments work like silent assassins, sneaking up on a culprit without interfering with anything else, then vanishing without a trace. A new form of nanoparticles might be the latest to join the league of assassins. Microscopic molecules (pink) carry a deadly cargo which is only released when they encounter certain substances produced by cancerous tumours. Comparing untreated tumours (bursting with lively green cells, top left) to those drowning in dead cells (shown in red) as they face increasing doses of the drug (pink - concentration increasing from the upper middle panel to bottom right), highlights how effective the drug can be. And because the pills are modelled on sugar, the body knows how to break them down seamlessly once their mission is complete.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image adapted from work by Lu Su and Richen Li, and colleagues
• Departments of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Materials Science & Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA
• Reprinted with permission from the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Copyright 2018 American Chemical Society
• Published in Journal of the American Chemical Society, January 2018