Professor Dong Ha Kim Develops Light-driven Nanoparticle-based Innovative Cancer Therapy
- 작성처
- Date2025.03.24
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Professor Dong Ha Kim Develops Light-driven Nanoparticle-based Innovative Cancer Therapy
Dong Ha Kim | Luke P. Lee
Professor Dong Ha Kim from the Department of Chemistry & Nanoscience and his team has developed optically tunable catalytic cancer therapy using enzyme-like chiral plasmonic nanoparticles (CPNs). Published in the online edition of Nature Communications on March 15, the research findings suggest an innovative way of effectively eliminating cancer cells by precisely adjusting the catalytic activity of the nanoparticles using circularized polarized light (CPL).
The human body is home to complex biochemical reactions such as metabolism, signal transduction, and gene regulation that take place in a cascading manner. These reactions are regulated by enzymes and need to occur in a specific order under optimal conditions to achieve their full effectiveness. The research team mimicked these cascade reactions to develop cancer therapy that utilizes chiral nanoparticles.
The research team created biomimetic chiral plasmonic nanoparticles with glucose oxidase and peroxidase activities, respectively, and suggested a method of separately regulating each reaction using CPL. In both cell studies and animal model experiments, the groups sequentially irradiated with CPL showed the highest radical generation and the most efficient cancer treatment outcomes compared to other groups, proving the excellence of this technology. This research is significant as it proposes a method to overcome the limitations of existing catalytic cancer therapies by integrating chirality into nanoparticles to enable them to mimic natural selective reactivity within living organisms and adding an optically tunable function. This technique not only has potential for medical applications, such as targeted drug delivery and regenerative medicine, but also is expected to shift the paradigm of medicine using nanotechnology.
“Follow-up research is expected to examine this system’s broader applicability to diverse types of cancer, prove its effectiveness through clinical trials, and improve biocompatibility,” said Professor Kim. He added, “I hope that this new optical cancer therapy using nanoparticles is applied in real-life clinical settings.”
Published as a paper titled “Optically tunable catalytic cancer therapy using enzyme-like chiral plasmonic nanoparticles,” the research was carried out in collaboration with Distinguished Visiting Professor Luke P. Lee, a leading scholar of bioengineering who was invited to Ewha under the Ewha Frontier 10-10 Project, with the participation of corresponding authors including Professor Ki Tae Nam and Professor Jeong Woo Han from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Seoul National University, as well as Dr. Sehoon Kim from the Chemical and Biological Integrative Research Center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology.