Nanoscale 'cages' made from strands of DNA can encapsulate small-molecule drugs and release them in response to a specific stimulus, researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada have found in a new study.
The research, published online in Nature Chemistry, marks a step toward the use of biological nanostructures to deliver drugs to diseased cells in patients. The findings could also open up new possibilities for designing DNA-based nanomaterials.
'This research is important for drug delivery, but also for fundamental structural biology and nanotechnology,' said McGill Chemistry professor Hanadi Sleiman, who led the research team.
The McGill researchers first created DNA cubes using short DNA strands, and modified them with lipid-like molecules. The lipids can act like sticky patches that come together and engage in a 'handshake' inside the DNA cube, creating a core that can hold cargo such as drug molecules.
DNA nanostructures have several potential advantages over the synthetic materials often used to deliver drugs within the body
They also found that when the sticky patches were placed on one of the outside faces of the DNA cubes, two cubes could attach together. 'It opens up a range of new possibilities for designing DNA-based nanomaterials,' said Sleiman.
Sleiman’s lab has previously demonstrated that gold nanoparticles can be loaded and released from DNA nanotubes, providing a preliminary proof of concept that drug delivery might be possible. But the new study claims to be the first time that small molecules, which are considerably smaller than the gold nanoparticles, have been manipulated in such a way.
DNA nanostructures have several potential advantages over the synthetic materials often used to deliver drugs within the body, said Thomas Edwardson, a McGill doctoral student and co-author of the new paper. 'DNA structures can be built with great precision, they are biodegradable and their size, shape and properties can be easily tuned.'
The Sleiman group is now conducting cell and animal studies to assess the viability of this method on chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and prostate cancer, in collaboration with researchers at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital.