Scientists at Stanford University are developing a treatment for cancer that could be one thousand times as potent as drugs available today.

Their study used a sheet of carbon, called “nano” graphene, a fraction of the size of living cells, to transport and deliver a drug potentially deadly to cancer cells. The drug itself had never been used in therapy because it does not dissolve in water.

But neither did graphene at first. Chemists clipped star-shaped “hydrophilic” attachments to the sheet, which splayed outwards from the surface, stabilizing the sheet in water. Vast expanses of “hydrophobic” areas remained on the sheet, now out of reach of water molecules. The new drug, SN38, spontaneously embedded itself on this hydrophobic surface. The complex dissolved.

The drug-sheet complex was tested on colon cancer, ovarian cancer, breast cancer, and glioma cell lines. This test found out how much drug was needed to kill half the available cancer cells in an experiment over seventy-two hours.

In this test, the drug-sheet complex performed more than a thousand times better than its clinically active cousin, CPT-11.

Josh Robinson, co-author of the paper reporting this study, is optimistic about the clinical viability of the new treatment. “We now need to try it on mice, and then go up the lab trial food chain,” he said.

Modified graphene sheets are a diverse group of materials that are being developed at the interface of nanotechnology and cancer therapy. Other structures that chemists and bioengineers are collaborating on include nanotubes, where carbon sheets curl into long, hollow, still tiny tubes, and nanodiamonds, 3-D nano-scale cages that carry drugs into cells.