With the funding from Ride for Dad and an impressive team of research partners, School of Pharmacy Professor Shawn Wettig’s research is set to take a big step forward, from the petri dish to real cancer cases. The Ride for Dad foundation has committed $104,000 to help Wettig and collaborators fine-tune a treatment that utilizes irradiated gold nanoparticles to target prostate cancer, one the most common cancer among Canadian men. The goal is to shorten treatment duration and reduce side effects, by delivering a more targeted treatment at a lower dose.
“We have everything we need to move this very quickly into a clinical setting,” said Prof. Wettig.
The project began a few years ago, when staff at Grand River Hospital (GRH) started investigating literature on how gold acts in the body when irradiated. They contacted Wettig, an expert in chemistry and nanoparticle research, to ask if he could produce gold nanoparticles in his lab to support GRH research. Since then, the research and the team have developed into a major local collaboration ready to move from the petri dish to in vivo trials, in real prostate cancer cases.
“This is a very elegant system,” Wettig said. The plan is to couple the gold nanoparticles with a molecule isolated from green tea that allows localized uptake. The green tea coating prepares the gold to bind specifically to malignant cells in the prostate, where the nanoparticles will deliver therapeutic doses of radiation to eliminate cancer cells.
The green tea coating also acts as a stabilizer to keep the gold nanoparticles small and separate, preventing them from solidifying into a chunk of gold. The gold nanoparticles are far too tiny to see with the naked eye. Approximately 1 billion nanoparticles would fit onto the head of a pin; they must be this tiny to move into cells.
According to another researcher on the team, Andre Fleck, a medical physicist from Grand River Hospital, “Radiation does a great job of fully destroying cancer cells in the body, but even better would be the possibility of injecting these activated nanoparticles to deliver a therapeutic dose from within the cell.” That is precisely the benefit of the technology that Wettig and his collaborators are developing.
“If you’re delivering this radiation from within tissue rather than sending a beam through the healthy tissue, the healthy tissue doesn’t even get touched,” said Fleck.
Wettig and Fleck also collaborate with Tony Mutsaers, a veterinary oncologist at the University of Guelph. Once approvals are in place, dogs that have terminal prostate cancer will be offered the new treatment, which is minimally invasive and reduces harm to healthy cells. Current treatments include chemotherapy and radiation.
Chemotherapy affects the entire body and radiation is usually beamed into the body, targeting one area, but still passing through layers of healthy tissue that are affected. The gold nanoparticles are a promising treatment approach because they deliver treatment directly to the cancerous cells in the prostate.
At this stage in their research, the team has already tested the treatment in the lab, in petri dishes, using prostate cancer cell samples to ensure the safety of their approach before offering it to pet owners who bring their dogs to the University of Guelph for help with naturally-occurring cancers. The new treatment will be an additional option offered to pet owners, who always get to choose which type of care is best for their situation.
“We’re using the same equipment – the same CTs, MRIs, etc. – as those used in treating humans,” notes Mutsaers. For participating pet owners, this is “an even more relevant outcome. We’re developing a treatment for dogs that will be meaningful for humans as well,” Mutsaers adds.
“What’s unique about this is we have the Grand River Regional Cancer Centre oncology expertise, we have Guelph, we have the School of Pharmacy, and we have the nearby McMaster reactor – one of the few with a high neutron flux that can produce the gold isotope 198 that we need to treat cancer,” says said Ernest Osei, head of medical physics in the Grand River Regional Cancer Centre. Osei is also an adjunct professor in physics and astronomy, and an assistant professor in systems design engineering, at the University of Waterloo. “This is a situation where we have the local experts, and the funding generated locally, and being used locally.”
The team also includes: research student Jason Chau at University of Waterloo; Festo Damian, an adjunct professor in the School of Pharmacy; Johnson Darko, an oncology medical physicist at Grand River Hospital, adjunct professor in physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo.