In this work the team of researchers steered helical nanomotors remotely, via an external magnetic field, through a tumour model to sense, map and quantify changes in the cellular environment. The model comprises both healthy and cancer cells embedded within a reconstituted basement membrane matrix and mimics the breast cancer environment. The study highlights a new way of targeting cancer cells by manoeuvring nanomotors inside a tumour and waiting for them to localise in the vicinity of the cancerous site. The researchers discovered that as the nanomotors approached the cancer cell membrane, they stuck to the matrix more strongly than they would to normal cells.
The paper “Dasgupta, Pally, Saini, Bhat & Ghosh. Nanomotors Sense Local Physicochemical Heterogeneities in Tumor Microenvironments. Angewandte Chemie (2020) can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202008681