UCSF

Stem cells have recently garnered attention as drug and particle carriers to sites of tumors, due to their natural ability to track to the site of interest. Specifically, neural stem cells (NSCs) have demonstrated to be a promising candidate for delivering therapeutics to malignant glioma, a primary brain tumor that is not curable by current treatments, and inevitably fatal. In this article, we demonstrate that NSCs are able to internalize 2 μm magnetic discs (SD), without affecting the health of the cells. The SD can then be remotely triggered in an applied 1 T rotating magnetic field to deliver a payload. Furthermore, we use this NSC-SD delivery system to deliver the SD themselves as a therapeutic agent to mechanically destroy glioma cells. NSCs were incubated with the SD overnight before treatment with a 1T rotating magnetic field to trigger the SD release. The potential timed release effects of the magnetic particles were tested with migration assays, confocal microscopy and immunohistochemistry for apoptosis. After the magnetic field triggered SD release, glioma cells were added and allowed to internalize the particles. Once internalized, another dose of the magnetic field treatment was administered to trigger mechanically induced apoptotic cell death of the glioma cells by the rotating SD. We are able to determine that NSC-SD and magnetic field treatment can achieve over 50% glioma cell death when loaded at 50 SD/cell, making this a promising therapeutic for the treatment of glioma.