Nanoparticle immune therapy shows potential to treat and prevent spread of pancreatic cancer to liver

UCLA Fielding School of Public Health's Dr. Andre Nel, professor of Environmental Health Sciences, co-authored research that finds a nanoparticle both inhibited and prevented the growth of pancreatic cancer in the liver.

“The liver’s immunologically suppressive environment acts as a niche for the metastatic cancer cells to grow, but it could be reversed by the nanoparticles, breaking this tolerance and causing the body to instead attack the cancer,” said Nel, corresponding author for the study, who also serves as a UCLA distinguished professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and director of research at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “This technology could potentially change the course of metastatic pancreatic cancer as well as preventing spread to the liver in newly diagnosed patients without metastases.”

The study was published March 2 in the journal ACS Nano; for more information on this work, see news releases from the UCLA Newsroom and UCLA Health.