The use of drug combinations is a really hot area in cancer treatment. The advan

Question

The use of drug combinations is a really hot area in cancer treatment. The advantage of nanoparticles is that we can not only combine multiple drugs together, but that we can also design nanoparticles to perform 2 or more independent functions in the body. You'll see a lot of examples over the coming weeks, but we would like you to start thinking about how you could design a multi-functional nanoparticle for breast cancer of interest. Think about what is the strongest clinical need – should you develop a nanoparticle that treats your disease at the same time in two different ways (e.g. synergistic treatment)? Or would you like to be able to diagnose and treat a disease at the same time (e.g. theranostic nanoparticles?) Or do you need a more robust way to measure whether a treatment is working (treatment monitoring)? Please explain the biological problem you are trying to solve and how you would go about designing one or more nanoformulations to solve this problem. And remember, you are welcome to use the literature for ideas! Please don’t write answer by hand and with reference please.

Explanation / Answer

In case of breast cancer the leading problem is that most drugs are facing great resistance, the drugs were designed to bind with estrogen receptors, continue therapy (tamoxifen like anti estrogen) in this way stops to be effective, hence the nanoparticle needs to be designed in such a way that will bind MED1` & HER 2 proteins, as these two proteins are key factors in estrogen specific cancer. So the anti estrogen nanoparticle should be a RNA nanoparticle which will selectively bind with HER2 & then eliminate MED1 expression, thereby suppressing cancer cell growth, and also sensitize the cancer cells towards tamoxifen treatment.

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