Imagine wearing a patch that can deliver localized, non-toxic cancer therapy? Chemists at UC Santa Cruz have developed a way to do this by designing novel light-sensitive compounds that are absorbed by cancer cells and when triggered by specific wavelengths of light, they release nitric oxide, which triggers cell death.
“It is not kind of a pipe dream type of approach because we have nicotine patch. You have hormone patches. So, I mean we are not really designing something completely out of the way, but it is just a clever use of certain compounds and certain properties of the compounds to deliver a certain molecule to a certain site,” says Pradip Mascharak, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz.
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