A promising discovery for advanced cancer therapy reveals that the efficiency of drug delivery in DNA nanostructures depends on their shapes, say researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology and the University of Kansas.

“For the first time, a time-lapse live cell imaging system was used to observe the absorption and controlled release of the drug doxorubicin (DOX) in live breast cancer cells,” says Dr. Risheng Wang, assistant professor of chemistry at Missouri S&T.
Wang and her colleagues packed the drug into three different DNA “origami”—“the shapes we deliberately create by assembling strands of DNA molecules into target structures,” she says.

Wang is the lead investigator and author of the study published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in Journal of Materials Chemistry B (“Time-lapse live cell imaging to monitor doxorubicin release from DNA origami nanostructures”), and featured on the cover of this issue.

“Shapes matter,” says Wang. “The optimization of the shape and size of self-assembled DNA nanostructures loaded with anti-cancer drugs may allow them to carry a greater quantity of the drugs, rendering them more effective.”

Image Credit:  Risheng Want et. al

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