IT WORKED for the ancient Greeks, so why shouldn’t it work for us? Some cancers are resistant to chemotherapy, but we can attack them successfully by hiding drugs inside folded-up DNA. DNA origami involves folding a single strand of DNA into a complex pattern, creating a 3D structure. Baoquan Ding at the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing, China, and colleagues loaded a tubular piece of folded DNA with doxorubicin, a chemotherapy drug. The DNA Trojan horse delivered a dose of the drug that proved lethal to human breast-cancer cells, even though they had developed resistance to doxorubicin (Journal of the American Chemical Society, DOI: 10.1021/ja304263n).
