Section: New Software and Platforms

In silico design of nanoparticles for the treatment of cancers by enhanced radiotherapy

Participants: T. Bastogne

More than eight million people die from cancer worldwide each year. Current treatment such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy are still limited in terms of benefit/risk ratio. Nevertheless, engineered nanoparticles have opened new interesting perspectives in cancerology, as emphasized by Brigger et al. since 2002. One of these promising solutions is based on the development of nanoparticles able to enhance the cytotoxic effect of radiotherapy. Nevertheless, the preclinical development in nano-medicine is slow, risky and expensive. Recently, Etheridge et al. (2013) highlighted the fact that many of the revolutionary nano-medicine technologies anticipated in the literature may be 20 or more years from clinical use. To speed up the preclinical development of medical engineered nanomaterials, we have designed an integrated computing platform dedicated to the virtual screening of nanostructured materials activated by X-ray making it possible to select nano-objects presenting interesting medical properties faster. That innovation gathers stochastic simulations and statistical modeling to estimate the impact of each design parameter describing the nano-object. That allows us to optimize composition factors in order to suggest one or few promising architectures regarding the medical purpose. The main advantage of this in silico design approach is to virtually screen a lot of possible formulations and to rapidly select the most promising ones. The platform can currently handle the accelerated design of radiation therapy enhancing nanoparticles and medical imaging nano-sized contrast agents as well as the comparison between nano-objects and the optimization of existing materials. Other applications related to nano-medicines will be subject to further developments (e.g., photodynamic therapy). That contribution has received the best innovation award from the Institut Mines-Telecom in 2014 and application results will be presented at the 36th PAMM-EORTC Winter Meeting in January 2015.