Nanobees

Tumors feel the deadly sting of nanobees
- From Nanotechnology Now

"In mice, nanobees delivered the bee toxin melittin to tumors while protecting other tissues from the toxin's destructive power. The mice's tumors stopped growing or shrank. The nanobees' effectiveness against cancer in the mice is reported in advance online publication Aug. 10 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation."

Basically, researchers used bee toxin to target cancer cells.

very interesting article.

However, the author didnot mentoned if they checked up the delivery of Mellitin through te blood brain barrier.

Secondly, the authors did mentioned implaned tumors of breast cells and other melanomas so I presumed that the mouse model used must be nude mouse....
How would the immune system respond to the entry of the mellitin conjugated particles if injected in a healthy normal individual with completely functional immune system.

 Good questions. I didn't look up the actual journal article:

Soman NR, Baldwin SL, Hu G, Marsh JN, Lanza GM, Heuser JE, Arbeit JM, Wickline SA, Schlesinger PH. Molecularly targeted nanocarriers deliver the cytolytic peptide melittin specifically to tumor cells in mice, reducing tumor growth. Journal of Clinical Investigation. August 10, 2009 (advance online publication)

But, I think they functionalized the nanoparticles to be attracted only to the cancer cells and injected the nanoparticles at the site.

My lay person's guess about the BBB is that Mellitin is so potent that the researchers would see increased mortality.