A common drug sitting in your medicine cabinet right now may help fight cancer

A common drug sitting in your medicine cabinet right now may help fight cancer

It’s been a go-to for headaches, fevers, and sore muscles for over a century. But new research suggests that aspirin—the everyday over-the-counter medication sitting in your cabinet—might also have another, far more unexpected use as an anti-cancer drug. Scientists have been eyeing aspirin as a potential preventative for cancer since the late 1980s when early studies found that regular aspirin use was linked to a lower risk of colorectal cancer.…

Nanoparticles that deliver cancer drugs directly to tumors

Anne Trafton | MIT News Polymer-coated nanoparticles loaded with therapeutic drugs show significant promise for cancer treatment, including ovarian cancer. These particles can be targeted directly to tumors, where they release their payload while avoiding many of the side effects of traditional chemotherapy. Over the past decade, MIT Institute Professor Paula Hammond and her students have created a variety of these particles using a technique kn…