Researchers at IIT Madras have developed and patented a new system of delivering drugs to treat breast cancer. This system can eliminate cancer without any side effects.

Breast cancer is a leading cause of death among women worldwide and the severe side effects of chemotherapy and radiation therapy used to treat it make it even more challenging. But now, scientists at IIT Madras have developed a new system of drug delivery for treating breast cancer, which can eliminate cancer without any side effects. They have also patented it.

According to officials, researchers have taken advantage of the unique properties of 'nanomaterials' to design a drug delivery system that can deliver anti-cancer drugs to cancerous cells. This innovation provides a safer and more effective option to the age-old treatment method.

Swati Sudhakar, Assistant Professor, Department of Applied Mechanics and Biomedical Engineering, Institute, told that nanocarriers are biocompatible and are not toxic to non-cancerous or healthy cells. Therefore, they are a perfect alternative to treatments like chemotherapy or radiation therapy or chemotherapeutic drugs, which not only attack cancer cells but also affect healthy cells causing severe damage like hair loss, nausea, fatigue.

Sudhakar said that cancer cells can also develop resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs by taking repeated doses of the drug, which ultimately reduces the effect of the treatment. He said that several tests were conducted on breast cancer cells in the laboratory, which showed that nanoarchaeosomes loaded with drugs started killing the cancer cells and effectively stopped the growth of tumors even at very low doses of chemotherapeutic drugs.

The findings of the research, funded by IIT Madras and the Ministry of Education, have been published in prestigious journals including Materials Advances and Nanoscale Advances published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. An Indian patent was granted last month for this research. Sudhakar said that this research holds great promise to transform cancer treatment therapies, improve survival rates and enhance the quality of life for millions of patients worldwide. Our next step is to test the effect of this drug in animal models.