Railway networks in every cell could help drug delivery

New research from the University of Warwick reveals striking similarities between networks within our cells and those of the railway. This research has the potential to improve the delivery of drugs into the body during cancer therapy.

A team led by Professor Robert Cross at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Mechanochemical Cell Biology has found that microtubule networks in our cells bare striking similarity to railway networks in how they stabilise and maintain their connections. The team hopes that their findings will help lead to improvements in drug delivery for cancer therapies, as microtubules are key components in cellular processes like cell division.

Microtubule networks can be found in nearly every single cell of our bodies and, like train tracks, they facilitate the transport of cargo around cells. Kinesin, a type of cargo molecule, was found by the team to subtly change the structure of the microtubules it bound to, increasing their length and stabilising them. Cross and his team believe that these changes inform the cell not to dismantle kinesin-bound microtubules, so that, in the same way a train track will stay running if lots of trains use it, microtubules used by a lot of kinesin will be preserved.

The research was performed using a custom-built microscope, with funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Their findings were shared in their paper – “Kinesin expands and stabilizes the GDP-microtubule lattice” – in Nature Nanotechnology mid-March.

Following this study, work could be done to investigate the effects of different drugs on microtubule stability and transport. Taxol®, a drug currently used in cancer therapies, has an effect on microtubules that, before this research, was poorly understood.

Cross explained that this work “shows that the kinesin railway engines stabilise microtubules in a Taxol®-like way. We need to understand as much as we can about how microtubules can be stabilised and destabilised, to pave and illuminate the road to improved therapies.”