Ole Miss Researchers Develop 3D-Printed Nanoparticles to Target Tumors Directly

A team at Ole Miss's Thad Cochran Research Center loaded cancer-fighting drugs into microscopic capsules, each roughly 300 times smaller than the width of a human hair, and 3D-printed them into a structure designed to sit directly at a tumor site, avoiding the full-body chemical assault that defines traditional chemotherapy.

The study, published in Pharmaceutical Research in April 2026, centers on particles called spanlastics: elastic nanoparticles measuring 200 to 300 nanometers loaded with doxorubicin, one of the most widely used anticancer drugs. Those particles are embedded into a hydrogel construct built through a process the team calls FRESH 3D printing, short for Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels, and the finished implant is placed at the tumor site rather than introduced into the bloodstream.

The distinction matters because of how conventional chemotherapy works. When doxorubicin enters the bloodstream, it travels everywhere, damaging fast-reproducing healthy cells in hair follicles, intestinal linings, and skin alongside cancer cells, producing the hair loss, nausea, vomiting, and anemia patients endure. "Delivering chemotherapeutics is always a nasty business because of the severe side effects that the patients experience," said Jaidev Chakka, a principal scientist in the Ole Miss School of Pharmacy. "The goal of this publication is: How can we minimize those side effects?"

The concept works like this: traditional chemotherapy is like cutting water service to an entire Oxford neighborhood to fix one leaking pipe. The Thad Cochran method pipes the repair to one address. "Having the drug in an implant, or in our case, a 3D-printed construct, and placing that construct at the tumor sites means we can concentrate the delivery to the tumor area, instead of throughout the whole body," said Elom Doe, a third-year doctoral student in pharmaceutical sciences originally from Accra, Ghana.

Size also gives the spanlastics a cellular advantage. Small enough to cross cell membranes, they carry doxorubicin directly inside cancer cells, where the drug must reach DNA, RNA, or cellular pathways to be effective. "If the drug is not able to penetrate the cell membrane or be taken up by the cell, the effect of the drug is none," Chakka said. "But when we put that drug in a nanoparticle, we are also protecting the drug from degradation, so we are actually pushing a good amount of drug molecules into the cell in one go."

The system was tested on breast cancer cells in the lab. "We actually applied this on breast cancer cells and we got some really, really promising data," said Mo Maniruzzaman, chair and professor of pharmaceutics and drug delivery and the team's lead researcher.

The findings, however, represent an early step. Testing was done in vitro, outside a living organism, and animal trials must precede any human application. "What we did is test how the drug acts in vitro or outside the body," Doe said. "We would have to test it in in-vivo models before we can think of delivering it to patients, and that's not a job you can do in a day." Chakka added: "There is still a long way to go."

The Thad Cochran work builds on a parallel thread of nanoparticle cancer research at Ole Miss. In late 2024, a team in the university's Interdisciplinary NanoBioSciences Lab, led by Thomas Werfel, associate professor of biomedical engineering, showed that a sugar-like glycopolymer coating on nanoparticles reduced unwanted immune responses while improving drug uptake in mouse breast cancer models, research conducted alongside doctoral student Kenneth Hulugalla. The two projects together mark Ole Miss, and Oxford, as an increasingly active site in the science of getting cancer drugs precisely where they need to go.