About This Project

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What is the context of this research?

Can Nanotechnology help improve drug delivery to potentially Cure Kidney Cancer?

Kidney cancer is now the 6th highest incidence of cancer in the United States, and has been steadily rising with 65,150 new cases diagnosed in 2013 with over 13,680 patients dying from this disease. The fivefold increase in incidence is largely due to many factors, such as risk factors of smoking, obesity, exposure to some environmental agents, renal failure, and hypertension. There has been a host of new FDA approved chemotherapeutic agents now approved for treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma including tyrosine kinase inhibitors, mTor inhibitors, and monoclonal antibodies.

One issue to overcome is delivery of these agents to the metastatic cancer which has spread outside the kidney. Nanotechnology is the engineering of incredibly small molecules to direct treatment. To make our drugs interact with cells and molecules the way we want them to, these drugs and carriers will have to be similar in size--a fraction of the size of a human hair. One property is the high surface area to volume ratio, meaning one can attach drugs to the nanoparticle in high concentrations. Therefore the concentration of the delivery of the drug to the cancer can be increased many fold.

What is the significance of this project?

Over 30% of men and women who are diagnosed with kidney cancer will have cancer spread outside the kidney to the lymph nodes or distant metastases. With new FDA approved chemotherapeutic agents now approved for treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma, the survival has still been low.

If the kidney cancer is contained within the kidney, we can cut out the cancer surgically with the robot, called robotic partial nephrectomy. This surgery cuts out the cancer, and saves 50-75% of the remaining kidney, which can function enough to keep the patient off hemodialysis.

For those men and women where the cancer has already spread outside the kidney, our lab is looking to determine if the delivery of a high concentration of chemotherapy medications to a targeted cancer will better affect survival. This project would aim to help patients afflicted with kidney cancer, to improve survival rates.

What are the goals of the project?

1. To develop an model of metastatic (aggressive kidney cancer) renal cell carcinoma to study.
2. To maintain this cell line in culture, and grow the cells in the lab.
3. To develop a nanotechnology delivery system of chemotherapy directed against the kidney cancer.
4. To integrate carbon rod heat ablation to the nanoparticle delivery system.
5. To measure tumor cellular kill integrating the nanotechnology.