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Nanomaterials Used in Possible Cancer Cure
Moiche writes "Medical researchers at CalTech and the Children's Hospital in Los Angeles have successfully inhibited cancer growth in mice by wrapping engineered RNA in nanomaterials and introducing them into the bloodstream. Two polymers and a special coating allow the therapeutic RNA to enter the cancer cell and release the therapeutic RNA payload. The new technique has slowed or prevented the development of secondary tumors in lab mice with Ewing's sarcoma. Further testing is planned on humans, and with other cancers. The Diamond Age seems closer, day by day."
This uses RNAi technology - that is the RNA they deploy is complementary to the RNA produced in Cancer Cells, and so they complement with the cancer RNA into a double-stranded piece of RNA - which screams virus - and the cell destroys it. Therefore stopping the growth of the cancer.
This method of using the nanomaterials to protect it and enable it to enter the cancer cells surely looks very promising!
"Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write it should be hard to understand."
nanocancer has it's own government website.
I believe in this more than virus gene therapy.
You can't let the immune system interfere!
Good stuff. I keep up to date on this .
Molecular biologists have been trying to engineer a safe, reliable, effecient method of drug delivery to selected cells for decades. This includes modifying viruses, poxviruses, herpes viruses, adenoviruses,retroviruses, etc.. but they all have problems. Creating the viruses isn't difficult, nor is mutation a serious problem. What is difficult is selectively targetting ONLY the cells you want, getting ALL (or most) of them with a sufficient quantity of whatever agent you are delivering. That's hard.
The big deal about this result isn't RNAi (which people have known about now for several years) but the success in hijacking the transferrin transporter to bring the RNAi in.
Have you ever tried to changed your internal pH to be alkaline balance? I'm sure you haven't cause you would be dead. The body can only exist in a narrow range of pH to functional properly.
Great links. Basically various groups of people trying to sell something and various other groups trying to shut them down.
Not exactly "research."
--MarkusQ
Slashdot simply doesn't have many persons these days who are particularly informed on the sciences.
Although I agree with much of your post, the above statement is *patently* false -- speaking from the academic medical community, I can name several professors, postdocs, and physicians within my university that follow science.slashdot on a regular basis.
Additionally, keep in mind that plenty of people who are specialists simply don't comment because the linked article doesn't provide enough detail. As a case in point, my research centers on cancer, but I'd be cautious to comment, simply because the popular media article (from 'The Economist') doesn't provide enough hard facts & methodology details -- if it was published in Cancer or Science, one could make an informed statement, but not as is.
Just my two cents.
Just as a fyi, the press release for Hu et. al.'s research can be found at the American Association for Cancer Research proceedings page -- it's more technical than the Economist article linked above, but is quite informative.
I am a medical oncologist and wanted to clear up the fact that inflammatory breast cancer is the worst type of breast cancer to have. Very aggressive treatment can get it under control but it has a very high rate of relapse. I hate being the bearer of bad news, but your friend should make sure that she is receiving state of the art combined modality therapy.
Are you sure that you don't mean PEG?
Please see
http://www.nektar.com/content/advanced_peg
This stuff could be used to attach to the surface
of transferrin and may have beneficial effects on
it. Also I am a little skeptical of cyclodextrin
encapsulating transferrin. Cyclodextrin is a
donut shaped molecule with a fairly small cavity.
It might hold say cholesterol, but not
a protein.
I assume you meant collagen, in your post. This has its own problems because, depending on its
source, it can be immunogenic.
"Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), which can also be Stage stage III or Stage stage IV breast cancer, is the least common but most aggressive type of breast cancer.
While only 1 to 4 percent of newly diagnosed cases are IBC, 60 to 70 percent of all women with the disease do not live five years beyond their diagnosis. "
Free Scotland!