Funded by The Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Dr Marie-Christine Jones, University of Birmingham
Award: £49,313.43
Awarded July 2023
The toxicity of anticancer drugs is a serious but under-researched issue, especially when the long-term side-effects of cancer treatment can be devastating and long-lasting. Both children and their families desperately need a more personalised approach to treat cancer effectively without such debilitating side effects.
Nanomedicines are an innovative technology which uses nanoparticles, structures which are so small that they have special properties, for drug delivery. They are a promising option to achieve this goal of kinder, less aggressive cancer treatments. Nanomedicines can reduce the toxicity of anticancer drugs because they are more able to carry the drug specifically to the tumour. This is because blood vessels which feed tumours are particularly leaky. This feature allows nanomedicines to leave the bloodstream to get directly to the cancer, preventing the whole body from being exposed to the anticancer drug.
There are already a few of these nanoparticle drug delivery systems in hospitals and there is proof that nanomedicines are safe and effective in people. However, nanomedicines are mostly used in adults - despite the potential benefits for children and young people. Currently, doctors do not have the right tools to predict how nanomedicines will behave when given to children or to identify who will benefit the most from nanomedicine treatment.
Dr Marie-Christine Jones at the University of Birmingham wants to look at the use of nanomedicines in children. This project aims to answer the important questions about nanomedicine to:
- Learn more about the use of nanomedicines in children with cancer. To do this, Dr Jones’ team will review existing research to understand how nanomedicines behave and to gather information on reported side-effects for nanomedicines in children. They will also meet with children and their parents get their views about this research.
- Learn more about what proteins in the blood can tell us about leaky tumour blood vessels. To do this, they will test blood samples from children with cancer.
- Expose blood vessels cells in the lab to proteins that will re-create the leaky blood vessels in a petri dish.
- Test nanomedicines in new leaky blood vessel model to find out which nanoparticles will work best for different types of childhood cancer.
Dr Jones believes that this is a truly distinctive project that has the potential to revolutionise the way children are treated with anticancer drugs.