NCI creates $20 million Stanford nanotechnology center

It is hoped that the nanotechnology devices being developed will be able to enter living cancer cells and then report back on what is going on inside them. The work should increase scientists understanding of the disease and point the way for future drug development.

NCI ‘centers of cancer nanotechnology excellence’ are research alliances of cancer centers, medical institutions, schools of engineering and physical sciences, nonprofit organizations and private corporations. Their mission is to integrate nanotechnology into cancer research. “It’s the team science approach,” said Dr Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, who directs the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford, and is to be the leader of the Stanford center.

“There is a big shift in science and medicine right now toward saying ‘look, we can’t just have individual labs doing their individual research.’ This is the other extreme – a large team of a diverse group of scientists and physicians,” continued Dr Gambhir.

Dr Gambhir’s lab has already begun exploring some of the frontiers of nanotechnology research, progressing the furthest with quantum dots, or qdots – tiny crystals that have pieces of protein attached to their surfaces that allow them to latch on to cancer cells and produce multicolored signals.

Much of his current work with qdots involves predicting and monitoring the response to therapy in animal models. He said that this work should lead to new ways to test drug efficacy in small-animal cancer models, thereby accelerating the process of bringing better drugs to the clinic.