What's new in biology? Nanoparticles allow carefully timed cancer drug delivery

A couple of months ago I wrote my first post on the topic of biomaterials, in which I touched on the use of nanoparticles in medicine. Now a recent piece of a research has caught my eye on IFLScience: http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/nanoparticles-give-tumors-one-two-punch-timing-drug-delivery

How cool is this?! Here we have two drugs which, when taken together, will attack tumour cells: erlotinib slows the growth of the cell, and doxorubicin damages the cell's DNA and prevents essential cell processes, leading to its death. The drugs have been shown to be more effective when delivered with a carefully measured time delay. And how do they discriminate between healthy cells and cancerous cells? Simple: the drugs are delivered by nanoparticles called liposomes which bind to folate receptors on cancer cells, causing the liposome to break down. The first drug is thus released into the cell, where it primes the cancer cell for the second drug, which is administered in the same way 4-24 hours later. Experiments on mice have shown that this time delay is significantly more effective than taking the two drugs at the same time.

This is a pretty big leap in cancer treatment and one of the great things is that the nanoparticles have such specificity that they can target tumour cells over healthy cells. Applications of nanotechnology are everywhere, really.