Surrey, King's trace cancer drug uptake in living cells
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- University of Surrey and King's College London researchers developed an analytical method that detects trace metals inside individual living cells and their internal compartments without killing the cells, published in Spectrochimica Acta Part B: Atomic Spectroscopy.
- The team used glass capillary tips—10 micrometers wide for whole cells, 3 micrometers for subcellular structures—to extract individual living pancreatic cancer cells and mitochondria-enriched material under a microscope.
- King's SEISMIC facility handled single-cell sampling while the University of Surrey's laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) facility detected and measured metals—a combination the researchers say has not been performed before.
- The researchers used thallium chloride as a chemically stable stand-in for thallium-201, a radioactive isotope under investigation as a cancer treatment, and detected thallium in individual cancer cells and inside mitochondria-enriched material for the first time.
- Dr. Claire Davison of King's noted that thallium-201's radiation acts over a very short distance—potentially destroying tumor cells while sparing healthy tissue—but only if the drug reaches the right part of the cell.
- Dr. Dany Beste of the University of Surrey said the methodology extends beyond cancer, opening up study of metal accumulation in infectious disease, diabetes, and liver conditions at a level of precision closer to biological reality.
- The team identified extracting the nucleus, where radiation damage to DNA occurs, as a key next step, along with improving methods to verify the purity of extracted subcellular material.
Why it matters: For targeted radionuclide therapy to work, the radioactive payload must land in the right cellular compartment—ideally the nucleus—to damage cancer DNA while sparing healthy tissue. This method gives drug developers, including those investigating thallium-201, the first way to verify subcellular drug distribution in living cells rather than dead ones, a prerequisite before such therapies can advance to clinical use.
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