Nanorods found better than spherical nanoparticles for targeted drug delivery

Conventional treatments such as drugs for diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease can carry harmful side effects, mainly because the treatments are not targeted specifically to the cells of the body where they’re needed.

“The elongated particles are more effective,” said Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute’s Erkki Ruoslahti, M.D., Ph.D. “Presumably the reason is that … the curvature of the sphere allows only so many of those binding sites to interact with membrane receptors on the surface of a cell.”

Nanoparticles have been studied as vessels to carry drugs through the body. Once they are engineered with antibodies that bind to specific receptors on the surface of targeted cells, these nanoparticles also can, in principle, become highly specific to the disease they are designed to treat.

The studies demonstrate that nanorods with a high aspect ratio attach more effectively to targeted cells compared with spherical nanoparticles. The findings hold promise for the development of novel targeted therapies with fewer harmful side effects.

http://beaker.sanfordburnham.org/2013/06/why-the-shape-of-nanoparticles-matters/