This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive and treatment-resistant brain cancers known to medicine, carrying a median survival of just 12–15 months, even with the best available care. Now, researchers at the MIT Media Lab have developed injectable nanoantennas, each about one-hundredth as wide as a human hair, that can be magnetically activated to create localized therapeutic electric fields that target and kill brain cancer cells without damaging healthy brain tissue.
"In laboratory and animal studies, this approach significantly reduced tumor growth and extended survival without detectable side effects, highlighting its potential as a precise and safe brain cancer therapy," says Deblina Sarkar, associate professor and AT&T Career Development Chair at the MIT Media Lab and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek group. The researchers named their technology "HITMAN"—short for highly localized electric-field-induced tumor therapy using magnetically actuated nanoantennas. An open-access paper describing this technology is published in Science Advances.
To test HITMAN against the most clinically realistic version of this disease, the research team worked with tumor tissue obtained from patients diagnosed with aggressive and chemotherapy-resistant glioblastoma at Mayo Clinic. Using cells derived from this tissue in the laboratory, the researchers demonstrated that HITMAN eliminated 52.2% of these drug-resistant cancer cells—more than five times the rate achieved by the standard chemotherapy drug temozolomide (TMZ)—while leaving healthy neurons and brain-supporting astrocytes unharmed. The team then implanted those patient-derived tumor cells into the brains of mice to recreate the disease in a living system.
In these orthotopic animal models—widely regarded as the gold standard for preclinical brain tumor research—HITMAN substantially inhibited tumor growth, extending median survival by more than 50% with no detectable toxicity to major organs or surrounding healthy tissue. The injectable nanoantennas can be activated wirelessly from outside the body through the application of a low-frequency (no higher than 200 kHz, to prevent tissue-damaging heat) magnetic field that can penetrate the skull and brain tissue. The magnetic field actuates parts within the nanoantennas made of magnetostrictive material, creating stress and strain that result in deformation of a piezoelectric film and produce localized electric fields.
Such localized electric fields were shown to preferentially attack glioblastoma at the cellular level, disrupting the cells' inherent bioelectric currents and fields, which regulate cellular function. This disruption provoked a number of antitumor mechanisms, including protein unfolding, membrane damage and endoplasmic reticulum stress, curtailing the production of a cell's functional proteins. These forms of cell dysfunction led to cell death.
According to the researchers, cancer cells were selectively targeted over healthy cells because of their high proliferative rate, which elevates protein-folding demand, as well as their characteristic abnormalities in membrane composition and intracellular organelles. Among a wide array of control experiments, the researchers exposed glioblastoma cells to the nanoantennas without applying a magnetic field and exposed the cancer cells to a magnetic field alone, confirming that the demonstrated effects were due to the nanoantennas and their magnetic-field activation. They also tested for side effects on the animal models' major organs—kidneys, liver, spleen, lungs and heart—and detected none.
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