They Wrapped a Cancer Drug in DNA. It Got 22,000 Times Stronger.
Northwestern scientists made an old leukemia drug 22,000x more potent by changing how it's delivered. The breakthrough isn't the drug — it's the shell.
Northwestern scientists took a weak cancer drug and wrapped it in DNA.
The drug got 22,000 times stronger.
They didn't invent a new medicine. They just changed the delivery.
The Drug We Already Had
5-fluorouracil has been around for decades. Doctors use it for leukemia.
It's weak. It dissolves poorly. It has side effects.
Not because the drug is bad — because our bodies don't know what to do with it.
The DNA Shell
Chad Mirkin's team at Northwestern built spherical nucleic acids (SNAs). Think of a tiny ball coated in DNA strands standing upright like quills on a porcupine.
They embedded 5-fluorouracil directly into those DNA strands.
The result: a nanoparticle that cancer cells actually want to eat.
The Numbers
The SNA version entered leukemia cells 12.5 times more efficiently than the standard drug.
It killed cancer cells up to 22,000 times more effectively.
It reduced cancer progression 59-fold in animal models.
No detectable side effects.
Why This Matters
The breakthrough isn't the drug. We've had 5-fluorouracil since the 1950s.
The breakthrough is the delivery method.
What if you could take every existing cancer drug — every drug that works but causes horrible side effects — and make it 20,000 times more potent while eliminating the toxicity?
That's not a hypothetical anymore.
What Comes Next
Flashpoint Therapeutics is commercializing the SNA platform. The research published in ACS Nano in November 2025.
Human trials haven't started yet. But the preclinical data is wild.
Northwestern's also using SNAs for HPV cancer vaccines. Different application, same core idea: the shell changes everything.
The Bigger Picture
Pharmaceutical companies spend billions developing new drugs.
What if the drugs we need already exist?
What if we just haven't figured out how to get them where they need to go?
A DNA shell just answered that question for leukemia. The rest of medicine is watching.
Keep Reading
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