New Method for Piercing Living Cells

A team of experts from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) announces the development of a new method of piercing through cellular walls. This is notoriously hard to do, despite the small sizes these structures have. According to the group, their method relies on using small chemical explosions at the nanoscale to get DNA, proteins, and all sorts of other small molecules through the cellular defense mechanisms.

While this may seem undesirable at first, it actually makes a lot of sense when thinking of resistant microorganisms. For example, bacteria can coat their cultures with a structure known as a biofilm, which immune system cells find incredibly hard to pierce. By using the new approach, various blood cells could pass through the barrier, dismantling the colonies underneath. The same could hold true for cancer tumors, where drugs could finally pierce the cellular wall, allowing for proteins to go into the cell's central core, sending a kill signal to all current processes going on inside.

“This technique could allow us to deliver a wide variety of therapeutics that now cannot easily get into cells. One of the most significant uses for this technology could be for gene-based therapies, which offer great promise in medicine, but whose progress has been limited by the difficulty of getting DNA and RNA into cells,” says Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering professor Mark Prausnitz. The new research was made possible via grant money secured from the Institute of Paper Science and Technology (IPST) at Georgia Tech, and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“We could get almost all of the cells to take up these molecules that normally wouldn't enter the cells, and almost all of the cells remained alive. Our laser-activated carbon nanoparticle system enables controlled bubble implosions that can disrupt the cell membranes just enough to get the molecules in without causing lasting damage,” says the lead author of the investigation, Prerona Chakravarty, PhD. Details of the laser-based method, which leaves 90 percent of targeted cells alive, appears in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“This is the first study showing proof of principle for laser-activation of reactive carbon nanoparticles for drug and gene delivery. There is a considerable path ahead before this can be brought into medicine, but we are optimistic that this approach can ultimately provide a new alternative for delivering therapeutic agents into cells safely and efficiently,” Prausnitz says.