Nanoparticles for gene therapy improve
About five years ago, Professor Janet Sawicki at the Lankenau Institute in Pennsylvania read an article about nanoparticles developed by MIT’s Robert Langer for gene therapy, the insertion of genes into living cells for the treatment of disease. Sawicki was working on treating ovarian cancer by delivering — through viruses — the gene for the diphtheria toxin, which kills tumor cells.“I had been working with adenoviruses to deliver DNA, and I was running into some problems with using them,” says Sawicki. “The problem with viruses is that they can produce a serious immune response in the host, which can be lethal.”After reading about the nanoparticles, Sawicki e-mailed Langer, an MIT Institute Professor and chemical engineer, to inquire about launching a gene therapy project with the nanoparticles. “I thought they would be perfect for what I was trying to do,” she recalls. The resulting collaboration has led to a promising potential...