New Delivery Technique Hits Solid Tumors with Arsenic Trioxide

A new delivery mechanism has been developed that allows the classic chemotherapeutic agent arsenic trioxide to kill solid tumors effectively.

Conventional wisdom has been that arsenic trioxide, which works against some types of leukemia, cannot be used against solid tumors because of its extreme toxicity and rapid excretion from the body.

However, in a paper published in the July 2010 issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research investigators at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, USA) described a method for encapsulating arsenic trioxide inside nanoparticle-sized liposomal vesicles to form what they called "nanobins.” Efficacy of treatment with arsenic trioxide nanobins was evaluated in breast cancer-cell cultures and in a mouse model of human "triple-negative” breast cancer.

Results showed that while the nanobins were much less cytotoxic in vitro than free arsenic trioxide against the panel of human breast cancer-cell lines, they dramatically increased the therapeutic efficacy of arsenic trioxide in vivo in the mouse model of triple-negative breast cancer. More...