An international team of researchers has developed a drug
delivery technique that utilizes graphene strips as “flying carpets” to deliver
two anticancer drugs sequentially to cancer cells, with each drug targeting the
distinct part of the cell where it will be most effective. The technique was
found to perform better than either drug in isolation when tested in a mouse
model targeting a human lung cancer tumor.
The researchers also found that an anticancer protein,
TRAIL, can serve as an active targeting molecule to bind directly to the
surface of cancer cells, which had not been demonstrated previously. The work
was done by researchers at North Carolina State University, the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and China Pharmaceutical University (CPU).