Osmium in Cancer Cells May Be a Useful Weapon
Using powerful X-ray beams to probe inside a cancer cell, researchers have determined that osmium could be a viable element for new cancer drugs.
About half of all chemotherapy drugs use platinum, but this has platinum which reacts in the nucleus, possibly leading to undesirable side effects. Osmium is a rare metal which could replace platinum in chemotherapy drugs, but first researchers needed to know where the osmium would wind up. To determine this, the researchers used the Diamond synchrotron to precisely track osmium in human lung cancer cells with a precision of 100 nanometres.
The researchers revealed the functioning of osmium in the cells using synchrotron X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) imaging. This enabled the researchers to observe the osmium in a single lung cancer cell. However, since osmium’s reactivity is determined by its ligand coating, these were labelled with bromine.
Once in the cell, the researchers observed that the osmium stayed in the cytoplasm, while the ligands penetrated into the nucleus, suggesting a twin attack on the cell.
Professor Peter Sadler, from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick explained the use of osmium and their research process: “Osmium is a rare precious metal, however, since it can act as a catalyst, a very little amount is needed for reactions in the cancer cell, therefore it could be a sustainable treatment going forward. We wanted to see how exactly it worked in a single cancer cell, which involved a variety of novel techniques, including taking water molecules out of the cell and rapidly flash-freezing it. Whereas usually cells are chemically altered to see the reactions, in our method they are close to their natural state, making our results more authentic.”
It was hard work, as Dr Elizabeth Bolitho, from the Department of Chemistry and Diamond explained: “We worked 24 hours a day, 5 days a week to collect these exciting data, allowing us to see inside cancer cells to a nanoscale resolution. This has provided crucial insights into potential cellular targets of such Osmium catalysts.
“Not only were we able to track the osmium in a lung cancer cell, but more widely in breast cancer, ovarian and prostate cancer cells, for example, which provides hope that in the future osmium could be used to treat a range of different cancer.”
Source: News-Medical.Net
Journal information: Bolitho, E. M., et al. (2021) Tracking Reactions of Asymmetric Organo‐Osmium Transfer Hydrogenation Catalysts in Cancer Cells. Angewandte Chemie. doi.org/10.1002/anie.202016456.
