The global development of anti-cancer drugs is mainly focused on the search for drugs, but the means of targeted delivery of such drugs precisely to diseased cells are no less important. One of them is polymer capsules. The protocol that makes it possible to prepare optimal capsules for various drugs was developed by employees of the Laboratory of Nano-Bioengineering of the Institute of Engineering Physics for Biomedicine (PhysBio) of the MEPhI together with colleagues from Sechenov University and the University of Reims (France).

 “Oddly enough, we were the first to raise the question of how the physicochemical properties of capsules affect their ability to deliver drugs,” says the head of the laboratory, Professor Igor Nabiev. - Whatever you add to the capsule, it will in any case come to the tumor for the simple reason that cancer cells are phagocytes, "eaters", they eat everything that gets to them. The whole question is in the distribution and in the fact that the medicine gets there quickly and in large quantities, so that it spends as little time as possible in healthy tissues and does not harm them (since these drugs are toxic), and when it gets to the patient, it would act most effectively ".

The results of the study were published (https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/BM/D2BM00829G) by the Biomaterials Science journal of the Royal Chemical Society of Great Britain, one of the most prestigious international scientific journal according to the Journal Citation Reports ranking.