It sounds like something from the vivid imagination of Harry Potter writer JK Rowling – a drug that has its own invisibility cloak to sneak quickly past the body’s defence and reduce inflammation.
But the stealth mode medication is for real, although so far it has only been tested on mice and is years away from being approved for commercial use. This fiendishly clever use of technology brings great hope for future treatments for patients suffering from the pain of inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis.
Nanotechnologists at Harvard Medical School are behind the technology, which combines drugs to reduce inflammation with nanoparticles – microscopically tiny particles that are being increasingly utilised in biomedical research.
The Harvard team filled the nanoparticles with peptides that reduce inflammation and the surfaces were then coated with a substance that collects an outer layer of water. The water then becomes the nanoparticle’s invisibility cloak that fools the immune system and stops it destroying the nanoparticle, allowing it to go directly to the area of the body where the inflammation has struck.
Once the nanoparticle has reached the inflammation site, it releases chemicals that reduce the inflammation but don’t do any harm to the immune system. Rheumatoid arthritis is caused when the immune system malfunctions, attacking the healthy tissue around the joints. Anti-inflammatory drugs are used to suppress the immune system and prevent this attack but the drugs currently in use cause a variety of painful side effects.
For those suffering the painful symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, the development of such technology would offer much needed and faster relief – medication-using nanotechnology reaches the site of inflammation four hours faster than conventional drugs. It could also mean they would need less medication and reduce the potential for side effects.
The research team now plans to test their technology in larger animals before carrying out clinical trials on humans.
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