NEW ORLEANS — On a screen at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) conference here on Saturday, one of Jinming Gao’s graduate students squirted an acid into a test tube in their lab at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Almost immediately, fluid at the end of the tube began to glow as a white star under infrared light, visible on a surgical monitor. When the student squirted it with a base, the light winked out.
Inside the tube is a nanomaterial that, on the molecular level, looks like a cluster of strings — polymers — organized into a sphere. Gao, a biomedical engineer working in cancer applications and a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center, calls it a micelle, and it has several unique properties that experts say other labs have struggled to achieve. In particular, micelles can carry a therapeutic payload and deliver it only at the precise acidity of a cancer tumor.
It took more than a decade to develop this nanomaterial, Gao said. Now, his lab and the company he founded around the technology, OncoNano Medicine, are moving into the clinic and testing new applications for these micelles against cancer. They include highlighting tumors with a fluorescent dye to help surgeons excise cancer in the operating room, as well as releasing immunotherapy drugs directly into tumors.
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