Michael Mitchell, J. Peter and Geri Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Bioengineering (BE), and Christian Figueroa-Espada, doctoral student in BE at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, developed an RNA nanoparticle therapy that stops the spread of multiple myeloma, an incurable bone marrow cancer that kills over 100,000 people yearly. This new form of treatment, described in their study published in PNAS, turns off a cancer-attracting function in human blood vessels, which disables the pathways through which the cancer cells travel.
“To stop the spread, we aimed to turn off this function of CyPA using RNA therapy, targeting the microenvironment of the cancer instead of the cancer cell itself,” said Mitchell in the Penn Engineering article. “But getting nucleic acids into the marrow was challenging due to the complex biological barriers.” Read the full story here.