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).

“This is the first study to demonstrate that DNA origami can be used to circumvent drug resistance,” says Hao Yan at Arizona State University in Tempe, who jointly led the work. The cancer cells may not recognise the DNA origami as a threat in the way that free doxorubicin is, he suggests. The folded DNA might also alter the pH inside the cells, increasing the drug’s activity.