Cancer is a leading cause of death in Manitoba, Canada and throughout the world. While considerable advances have been made in the treatment of different cancers, patients still suffer many side effects from current treatments.

The use of nanoparticles (ultra-fine particles in the nanometer scale) as drug carriers to treat cancer has shown promising results in targeting cancer tissue, resulting in better anti-cancer effects and fewer unwanted side effects in other parts of the body.

To enable the clinical translation of many of these nanoparticles, more work is needed to understand their behaviour in the body – especially their ability to penetrate deep into the cancer tissue to kill the cancer cells more efficiently.

We will design different nanoparticles that vary in size and surface properties, and we’ll test their ability to effectively penetrate cancer tissues under conditions similar to real-world scenarios.

This project will inform us about the best nanoparticle designs for penetration into cancer tissues. These nanoparticles will be used in follow-up animal experiments, and they will likely be used to treat patients in the clinic. In the future, successful nanoparticle designs will more effectively cure cancer patients and improve patient outcomes.