This summer, the PD[N]ano Lab hosted two NDnano Undergraduate Research Fellowship (NURF) students, Jack Latilla Campbell and Kolbe Schlosser, both of the University of Notre Dame. Working at the intersection of nanoscience, engineering, and precision medicine, each took on one of oncology’s hardest problems: how to kill a tumor without poisoning the patient.
Chemotherapy has long been effective against cancer, but its benefits come tethered to a well-known cost — the same drugs that destroy tumors also damage healthy tissue, sometimes severely and irreversibly. Both NURF projects this summer asked a shared question: what if the drug could be delivered only where it’s needed, and switched on only once it arrives? The lab’s answer is a class of engineered carriers called magnetoelectric silica nanoparticles, or MagSiNs, which are designed to shuttle a drug to tumor tissue and then release it on demand in response to an applied magnetic field.
Jack Latilla Campbell: Getting Past the Blood-Brain Barrier
Jack’s project, Magnetoelectric Silica Nanoparticles as Blood-Brain Barrier Vehicles for the Treatment of Glioma, tackled one of the most stubborn obstacles in neuro-oncology. Gliomas sit behind the blood-brain barrier, a protective layer that keeps most drugs out of the brain — and out of the tumor. Jack worked on adapting the MagSiNs platform, and a lipid-based formulation of it, to carry a glioma chemotherapy across that barrier without damaging it.
To test the idea, he built a laboratory model of the blood-brain barrier using human brain endothelial cells grown on a membrane, with glioma cells cultured on the far side. When he compared the free drug to the nanoparticle-delivered version, the lipid MagSiN formulation reduced glioma cell viability where the free drug alone did not — a signal that the carrier had crossed the barrier and delivered its payload to the tumor cells. Next steps include testing at higher, more clinically relevant drug concentrations and assessing exactly how gently the carrier treats the endothelial layer on its way through.
Along the way, Jack picked up a formidable set of bench and in vivo skills — cell culture and aseptic technique, cell-treatment assays, mouse handling and procedures, a range of separation and purification methods, and analytical work using ICP-OES to track metal content in his samples.
Kolbe Schlosser: Targeting Metastatic Colorectal Cancer
Kolbe’s project, Core-Shell Nanoparticles for Targeted Therapy Against Metastatic Colorectal Cancer Cells In Vitro and In Vivo, aimed the platform at a cancer with a five-year survival rate of roughly 14% once it has spread. The strategy here approaches the targeting problem from a physics and engineering angle: bind a potent drug to the nanoparticle so that it stays inert while in transit, then use magnetic stimulation to encourage selective uptake by cancer cells and trigger release only there.
Kolbe tested the approach across three cell lines chosen to tell a complete story — a healthy human endothelial line to gauge off-target toxicity, a primary colorectal cancer line, and a metastatic line derived from the same patient as the primary. Using a fluorescent live/dead assay to read out efficacy, his early data showed a strong reduction in toxicity to the healthy endothelial cells while the treatment retained its killing power against both the primary and metastatic cancer lines — exactly the separation the platform is designed to achieve. As he continues in the lab through the academic year, Kolbe will move toward in vivo experiments to test the most promising approach in living models.
Kolbe’s summer added in vitro and in vivo cancer-testing techniques to his toolkit, along with cell culture, mouse handling, fluorescent imaging and microscopy, and bioconjugation methods for attaching therapeutics to nanoparticles.
Looking Ahead
Two students, two of the deadliest cancers, one shared engineering principle: precision delivery, triggered on demand. Both projects continue in the PD[N]ano Lab this year, and both students leave the summer with the kind of hands-on, cross-disciplinary experience — from wet-bench chemistry to animal models to analytical instrumentation — that defines the NURF program at its best. Congratulations to Jack and Kolbe on a productive summer, and we look forward to seeing where the next phase of this work leads in academic year 2027.
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