Research projects

Professor Roberta Tasso is a passionate researcher, spending most of her days in the laboratory with her team. Nevertheless she loves spending her free time going to the theater and concerts. She’s a huge music enthusiast, particularly rock music. She also enjoys spending time with her friends – especially indulging in sushi!

Artificially-created nanoparticles are already used in cancer therapies to deliver drugs around the body, but don’t always work as well as expected. Professor Tasso and her team are exploring an innovative approach using a nanoparticle called an extracellular vesicle, or EV, to deliver drugs straight to metastatic tumours. These tiny, fat-covered particles are produced naturally by our cells, and can carry information around our bodies.

The team expects EV nanoparticles to be much more efficient in targeting metastatic cancer cells and avoiding healthy tissue, which could lead to new ways to detect metastasis as well as a kinder treatment with fewer side effects. One way EVs do this is by attaching onto the unique tissue that grows around a tumour, rather than the tumour itself. As they are a familiar particle that already occur in our bodies, they are easily absorbed and travel freely through the bloodstream into hard-to-reach organs.

The team will engineer these EVs to hold known effective anti-cancer drugs, which are protected by the fatty layer around the particles which means they can elude our immune system. They will test this on breast cancer tumours using Paclitaxel, a widely-used chemotherapy drug.

If effective, this novel drug delivery system could be used with different drugs to treat other metastatic cancers. They hope that their exciting research will show that this method of targeting tumours is not only more effective than existing therapies, but is also cheaper and gentler for patients.