TU Dressden BIOMOD Find'n'Bind

It is a constant struggle. ♪[laser blast] The battles have been waging since a long, long time ago. It is a galactic war in our own bodies where our own armies -- our healthy cells -- get killed. We don’t need to quote statistics ♪[hospital noise] to describe the harsh reality of cancer in its various forms [lights flicker] or the reality of chemotherapy and uncertainty of aggressive treatments. Cancer cells are cells that don’t stop dividing and take over. Cancer is not a rare battle for one-in-a-million. Millions of people fight every day, everywhere. Many drugs have been used to take out cancer and one way to introduce them into the body is using liposomes. A liposome is like a tiny bubble made up of the same materials used in the cell membrane called a lipid bilayer. Inside this little bubble, drugs can be stored but they still need to find the cancer cell. Antibodies bind very specific proteins. Like proteins expressed only in cancer cells, and not in healthy cells. Now the drugs are right where they should be. But they are still in the liposome! We must have a new hope. To solve this issue the TU Dresden BIOMOD team designed a novel two-component system... Find’n’Bind! In addition to the liposome, a release mechanism will be introduced. This tiny, 15 nm, gold particle has a special kind of peptide to break the liposome. A different antibody that is also specific to cancer cells is attached. We saw that if the liposome binds alone, drugs are not released. Similarly, the peptides by themselves will not do anything. When, and only when, both the immunoliposome and the gold nanoparticle bind to the cell the peptides will break open the lipid layer releasing drugs that are ready for action. This Find’n’Bind system is extra special because it can be tailored to specific cancers. The antibodies can be changed depending on the cancer type and which antigens are expressed on their surface. The drugs being transported can also, of course, be changed. This modular system is simple, and adaptable making is more feasible for pharmaceutical markets than some other immunoliposome systems that have complicated surface modifications. Most importantly, we have shown that the liposome-breaking peptides are effective in-vitro. The battle is ongoing ♪ but we are finding hope, and not giving up. We will find, and we will bind!