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Nanomedicine

Silence the target

Nature Nanotechnology volume 4, pages 544–545 (2009)Cite this article

A new formulation of magnetic nanoparticles steered to cells by external magnets can deliver nucleic acids to turn off the growth of tumour blood vessels in mice.

Over one hundred years after Paul Ehrlich was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, his concept of 'magic bullets' — where active agents and drugs are designed to bind precisely to their biological targets by the lock-and-key principle — is still the prevailing paradigm in pharmaceutical research because it promises to be effective with few side effects. Unfortunately, magic bullets are rare in therapeutic reality because it is challenging to find particular targets among the trillions of cells in a typical body and because the bullet must overcome a number of barriers to get inside the target cell. Consequently, physicians often have to flood the patient with drugs to achieve any therapeutic effect; this is expensive and comes with side effects.

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Figure 1: Magnetic targeting in drug and gene delivery.

C. PLANK / OZ BIOSCIENCES

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Christian Plank is at the Institute of Experimental Oncology and Therapy Research, Technische Universität München, Ismaninger Str. 22, 81675 Munich, Germany. plank@lrz.tum.de,

    Christian Plank

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  1. Christian Plank
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Competing interests

The author is a co-founder of the biotech company OZ Biosciences (OZB), Marseille, France. OZB develops and markets nanomagnetic reagents for nucleic acid delivery. The authors whose paper is discussed in this News & Views have used such reagents from OZB and have shown that their own reagents are superior.

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Plank, C. Silence the target. Nature Nanotech 4, 544–545 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2009.251

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