Silver Nanoparticles Kill Cancer Cells Resistant to Chemotherapy Drugs
In a brand new clinical study published in the journal Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine, titled “Silver nanoparticles modulate abc transporter activity and enhance chemotherapy in multidrug resistant cancer,” clinical researchers demonstrated silver nanoparticles to also be effective against cancers that are resistant to multiple types of chemotherapy drugs.
According to the study’s authors, “The emergence of multidrug resistant (MDR) cancer phenotypes dramatically attenuates the efficiency of antineoplastic drug treatments often leading to the failure of chemotherapy. Therefore there is an urgent need to engineer new therapeutically useful agents and propose innovative approaches able to defeat resistant cancer cells. Although the remarkable anti-cancer features of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) have already been delineated their impact on multiple-drug-resistant cancer has never been investigated. Herein, we report that AgNPs have a notable anti-proliferative effect and induce apoptosis mediated cell death both in drug sensitive and in MDR cancer cells.” In other words, the researchers confirmed earlier studies demonstrating silver nanoparticles to stop malignant cancer cells from spreading, causing them to commit cellular suicide (i.e., apoptosis). What’s more, they discovered that silver nanoparticles also stop the spread of malignant cancer cells that are resistant to multiple chemotherapy drugs! The researchers went on to demonstrate that adding silver nanoparticles to six different existing cancer drugs dramatically improved the effectiveness of the drugs against drug-resistant cancer.
