NEW DELHI: With the side-effects of therapy being one of the major stumbling blocks in advancing treatment for deadly diseases, a team of scientists, including one of Indian origin, has designed a "nanovehicle" that could drive drugs straight to their destinations - the diseased tissues - thereby sparing other healthy organs from any unintended effects.

Made of gold nanoparticles, the nanovehicle was found to be non-toxic when tested in cultured human cell lines, study co-author Arnab De of the Chicago-based AbbVie Bioresearch Centre told IANS in an e-mail interview.

"Drugs should ideally act only on diseased tissues. However, it is difficult to deliver drugs only to diseased tissues without affecting other healthy tissues. The side effects of drugs are often seen on these healthy tissues," De, a PhD from Columbia University in the City of New York, explained.

"This is a proof-of-concept study that shows that it may be possible to selectively navigate a drug to certain tissues. However, extensive animal studies need to be done to determine non-specific targeting in animals," noted De, who collaborated for the research with a team of scientists from the University of Delhi.

The research was conducted at professor Subho Mozumdar's laboratory at the University of Delhi.

Other co-authors of the study were Tanusri Nandi and Seema Garg, a student in Mozumdar's lab who played an important role in synthesising the nanoparticles.

"The beauty of the system is that it could in principle target drugs specifically to diseased tissues. While we have shown that we can target the liver, other tissues could potentially be targeted as well," De pointed out.

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