UK’s nose for nanotech to revolutionise pharma industry

Innovations in nanotechnology are revolutionising everything from dental health to data storage and telecommunications to textiles.

Now scientists from the UK have embarked upon a project which – partly through the use of nanotech processes – could revolutionise the pharmaceutical industry, too.

Teams from the University of Glasgow and the University of Strathclyde are developing a ‘molecular nose’, which will allow them to discover effective new medicines and potentially speed up drug development. The ‘nose’ will use more than 1000 sensors to detect how cells in the human body react to new drugs.

A huge range of drugs are tested for clinical trials each year but only one in 30 is ultimately used to treat patients. But by analysing how the components of human cells respond to different drugs, researchers would gain a better understanding of why failed drugs do not work. Any technology that could predict the effectiveness of drugs – thus cutting out time-consuming and costly trial-and-error practices – could be save the drugs industry millions of pounds and many years of development work.

The ‘molecular nose’, it is hoped, will do just that. This is a four-year project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and its lead researcher is Austrian-born Professor Walter Kolch from the University of Glasgow.

He says: “The idea for the molecular nose was developed during a conversation I had with Professor Jon Cooper, a nanoengineer colleague from the University. Our team now includes engineers, chemists, biologists and computational scientists – and the communication and interaction between these different disciplines has been instrumental in the successful development of the project.”

The nose works by assessing how a human cell responds to particular drugs and then records the pattern of responses, called a ‘signature pattern’. Currently, the nose has passed the ‘proof of principle’ stage and experiments into signature patterns are just beginning.

There are two implementations of the molecular nose project. The first, says Professor Kolch, is ‘straight forward’ and based on biological processes. This uses DNA-based reporter plasmids to help construct an integrated array of around 1000 sensors. A particular biochemical stimulus excites a different array of sensor constructs -and the resulting signature pattern is used to compile a reference catalogue of patterns produced by cellular signals.

Says Professor Kolch: “The second implementation is based on nanotechnology. We put selected sensors onto sub-microscopic nanoparticles, which we then input into living cells. Nanoparticles can exist in living cells without interfering in their viability and will enable us to read signals and monitor processes in living cells.

“With the nanotechnology model we will not be able to use as many sensors, because putting them on nanoparticles and reading them out in real-time could be limiting. However, our preliminary results show that the use of just 20 sensors can distinguish a large number of different signals.

“Ultimately, one of the aims of the project would be to reduce the cost of drug trials. Everyone knows that fewer and fewer compounds are coming onto the market and that drug development gets ever-more expensive. We are now studying whether we can use signature patterns to predict the action of an unknown drug. That would obviously have a huge impact on the pharmaceutical industry.”

The ‘nose’ will also identify the signature patterns of successful drugs which new drugs can imitate, creating an efficient pre-screening system for drug development. Signature patterns can also be used to avoid known side-effects from drugs.

Importantly, this new technology has potential implications for a wide number of areas, and not simply the pharmaceutical industry. The platform could also be used for environmental research and testing the influence of, for example, herbicides and pesticides on a molecular level. And because nanoparticles can be input into cells, it can also have an impact on the study of stem cell development and stem cell behaviour.

Towards the end of the project, which still has two years to run, Professor Kolch and the team will be looking for industrial collaborations in various areas. The teams will also be publishing their findings.

Says Professor Kolch: “It’s a very exciting time to be working in this field. First of all, there has been a technology revolution in life sciences and we now have the use of technology which wasn’t available five or 10 years ago.

“Secondly, the mind-set of researchers has changed. Previously, one researcher would work on one protein or one molecule. Now there is huge cross-fertilisation across different disciplines.

“We think and hope that this unique technology could really change the way we do things. It is a generic platform with many implications.”