Battery that starves cancer cells

“Hypoxia is a double-edged sword,” says Yongyao Xia, a materials scientist who specializes in
battery materials at Shanghai's Fudan University. Low oxygen levels in tumors mean that the
body's own immune cells cannot survive long enough to kill cancer cells (SN:
February 22, 2017). Hypoxic cells don't have enough blood flow to deliver lethal doses, so
they're resistant to treatments like radiation and conventional chemotherapy, says Fan Zhang of
Fudan, who studies biomedical materials. I'm explaining. "On the one hand, it provides a target
for precisely treating tumors," write Xia and Zhang in a new publication.

Hypoxia may act as a signal for chemicals called hypoxia-activated prodrugs. These are
chemotherapeutic drugs attached to a linker chemical, making the drugs active only in a hypoxic
environment, said Qing Zhang, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas at Dallas
Southwestern Medical Center. He was not involved in this research.

However, hypoxia-activated prodrugs have shown limited efficacy in clinical trials. This is
probably because the solid tumors in which they are used are not uniformly hypoxic or
sufficiently hypoxic. Xia and Fan Zhang wanted to find a way to make tumors more hypoxic to
give prodrugs a better chance. So the researchers and their colleagues used a small, flexible
battery that could partially encase the tumor. The zinc electrodes in the battery charge by
sucking oxygen from the surroundings. It also creates highly reactive oxygen pairs, which can
damage DNA but are not oxygen in the usable form for the cell.