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."

Comments

Wish this were available Right Now.

[danamania]

Today I've booked my pet mouse, muis in for surgery to remove her third tumour. The previous surgeries have been successful, but it would be ace not to have her go through a general anaesthetic again.

(I realise this is an important development for fixing human cancers, but as a pet owner - it would be great to have these working fixes for the little ones it's been demonstrated on!)

Re:Wish this were available Right Now.

[justins]

(I realise this is an important development for fixing human cancers, but as a pet owner - it would be great to have these working fixes for the little ones it's been demonstrated on!

Unfortunately, the treatment is likely to be insanely expensive for humans. There won't be a mouse treatment because recouping the costs of developing the treatment would be effectively impossible.

Science.Slashdot is dying.

[Anonymous Coward]

This discussion will, most likely, not really go anywhere. Slashdot simply doesn't have many persons these days who are particularly informed on the sciences. What this discussion will contain is:

- Two people who really and actually understand the science and make interesting deep posts
- 15 people who sort of kind of understand the science behind this and make comments which are interesting and good points-- but contain misinformed elements
- 30 people making jokes

Discussions on science.slashdot fall into two categories now: ones like this article; or stories that can be tangentially in some remote distant way linked to either the theory of evolution, the concept of global climate change, or research into stem cells. The former category acts as I have described above. The latter category is simply swamped by nothing but hundreds of comments from right-wingers ignorantly attacking the idea of science, and hundreds of left-wingers ignorantly defending the idea of science, with no room left for comments on the subject matter of the article itself. In either case it's something of a hunt to find those couple really ontopic posts, and very hard to tell the difference between the people who know their stuff and the people who only appear to.

Is there anything we can do about this? *Should* we do anything about this? I suppose we should just be grateful that at least there are those handful of decent posts in every science.slashdot article and the signal to noise ratio is better than at least, say, your average microsoft story on slashdot. However, I seem to remember a time that people on slashdot were nerds in the sense that they enjoyed seeking knowledge, and so knowledge about science was praised, singled out, and common. Now the slashdot readership is either simply apathetic toward science, treating it as something other people do-- or actively seems to view science as something dirty, and attempts to understand and effect the universe as human presumption. In either case there is little room or consideration left for a third category of persons.

Re:Science.Slashdot is dying.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for your response.

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.

Well, okay, but I was speaking about those who post comments, not those among the lurkers. The second group has always been very different on slashdot than the first.

Additionally, keep in mind that plenty of people who are specialists simply don't comment because the linked article doesn't provide enough detail.

Very true. And I would expect it would take an informed person to know exactly when they are not quite informed enough to comment :)

However from my perspective this is the problem. When I read slashdot, I read the comments to provide the detail the article generally leaves out. In a technical/computer article, this is a reasonable expectation, since the underlying information is relatively common and straightforward. Science articles however tend to be a bit more arcane, and as you say the linked articles are often much less trustworthy, so it's not really reasonable to expect there to be comments which imply or fill in the information the article leaves off. Unfortunately, these are the kinds of comments that make the comment section worth reading in the first place.

Unfortunately I do not know of a better way to get science news than watching Slashdot link The Economist. I wish I did :/

Venture capital funding or IPO?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Using a virus is sooo 19 hundreds.

OK, I'd love for there to be a cure for cancer, but I suspect that more likely this is just the perfect bunch of buzzwords to hype for funding, IPO or whatever. nanoxxx: tick; cure for cancer: tick.

The last cure-for-cancer stock I watched were Cell Pathways. Lovely rollercoaster stock. Perfect for pump and dump of IPO share options etc.

You're insane

[flyingsquid]

It's a mouse. In the wild, mice have to deal with an insane number of predators- cats, hawks, owls, snakes and so on. It's not a pretty world, and a mouse is unlikely to survive more than a couple years. The result is that natural selection only acts to increase the survivability of the mouse for the first couple of years. There's no point in selecting for a gene to help a mouse live to ten years, or even five years, because the odds of that gene ever being useful are pretty low when most mice get killed in a year or two. It's like Blade Runner: they live fast, but aren't designed to last very long. So you're engaged in a futile war against death, at best you'll put it off for a couple more months and then the mouse will get cancer again, or die of something else. There's a reason people research cancer in mice, and not, say, tortoises.

The other thing... WTF, its a mouse.

My family's dog died, he was a damn good dog, smart and with a lot of character, and I miss him. But he was getting old and if it wasn't kidney failure it would have been something else, soon, and I've accepted that. And there are people starving to death every day in Africa- and not to use that as an abstract rhetorical device, I've been there and seen them- shit, this nation needs to get a grip and get a fucking sense of perspective. They're just pets.

Re:You're insane

[porcupine8]

WTF, its a mouse. . . . They're just pets.

Having a pet means taking on complete responsibility for a life. You have a responsibility to minimize that life's suffering. If you don't want that responsibility, don't get a pet.

That said, I would personally probably not get more than one surgery for a recurring tumor in a small rodent - I think that the surgeries are likely causing more suffering than necessary, and I would probably just let the second tumor grow until it was obviously causing problems and then put the poor thing to sleep.

Re:You're insane

[flyingsquid]

You nasty, brutal, (but) realistic bastard.

Honestly, I do feel like a total mean prick bastard for posting this; I could have said the same thing and filed some edges off, I'm sorry. And a hypocrite, since in my life I've invested a lot of emotion in small animals, futile causes, and stuff that does nothing to help the starving Third World.

But what bugs me is that this society seems to have an unhealthy preoccupation with putting death off forever, at any cost. At some point we need to accept the inevitable. Where does it end; do we keep Fido hooked up to feeding tubes in a persistent vegetative state?

And what bugs me is that we seem to forget that we have so much wealth and power and there are so many who don't have jack. Many if not most pets in the United States have a higher quality of life than most human beings in the world: clean water, ample food, shelter, medical care. Isn't that screwed up? What would happen if we spent the same amount on helping other human beings as we did on pet food? It makes me want to be a communist... except they tried that already, and it didn't even work as well as this crazy system.

We're getting there

[MicroBerto]

Someday, we're going to think this was quite a crude process, but we're getting there! We're learning how to "program" the body. We're starting to learn how to code ourselves, and with some more breakthroughs, modern medicine will forever be changed just as penicillin changed the world.

During our lifetimes, it will be extremely exciting to see all of this happen. The scary part is how far we take it. Bad things can come of it too.

Re:We're getting there

[kim69]

siRNA is the way forward - the big deal here is not the possible cure for cancer, but a delivery route for the RNAi into cells. siRNA is the future of pharmacolology, a specific knockdown of enzymes and proteins without non-specifically inhibiting similar enzymes. The problem with siRNA, which we use very effectively in cell cultures by transfection techniques, is getting the large RNA molecules accross the fatty cell membrane and into the cell where is can do its work.

Previously people have shown that tail vein injections of siRNAs could cause knockdown of proteins in the liver, as the siRNAs accumulate there, but since we have been striving for a more effecient route into cells, especially in the CNS. Ironically we have been using a similar technique - by complexing siRNA to cholesterol and then further complexing with cyclodextrin to get the whole molecule into neurons, but that approach failed for us. We had considered using a receptor (as this group has used transferrin), such as muscarinic receptors but hadn't gone further.

The other approach which is having good success at the moment are using thiol conjugated siRNAs and attaching a further molecule called "penetrance". This effectively allows the siRNA to pass the plasma membrane.

Regardless these leaps in siRNA deliverance will revolutionise medicine over the next 20 years.

Re:Why is this even necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well established"? Your assertion doesn't make it so. I would like to see some peer-reviewed research published in a mainstream at least modestly reputable publication showing these results, please. And not just a correlation, but a causation must be shown, since you claim a direct causational relationship.

Please post links or references, or else I will have to ask that you be ignored as a complete kook.

Re:Why is this even necessary?

[Cheerio Boy]

Do you have sources?

I am not claiming that's a fake, I find what you are saying very interesting, but I'd never heard about it!

There seems to be plenty of data but the jury is still out:

Google: cancer+alkaline+PH+balance

Re:These kinds of stories are starting to bug me..

[Short Circuit]

If you even bothered to read the post, you'd see that this treatment has prevented tumor growth.

That's certainly positive evidence, if not proof. Used in combination with treatments like chemo, you've got a good regimen.

Normally, the idea of chemo is to hopefully kill cancer cells faster than they're being produced. Something like this could halt the production, allowing for much faster elimination of cancerous mass, and possibly even a reduction in chemo dose.

Re:how is it different from drugs?

[1337G]

The idea is that the nanomaterials are delivering RNA that compliments endogenous mRNA - the resulting double stranded RNA is degraded and the protein isn't made. I think TFA mentions that, and if it didn't it should.

Re:In a perfect world

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, the article say they were treating mice. I've heard plenty of these stories, I lost count years ago. Every month there's some fantastic new scientific development in cancer research, almost always involving mice or rats, or pigs or some animal other than human beings.

Cancer researchers should keep quiet till they've found a fucking cure. Frederick Banting didn't stir up media attention 20 years before he discovered insulin with crazy stories, "Hey, diabetics, just hold on for another few years.. I'm about to discover insulin. Hold Firm, stay resolute !!" No, He went public when it made a difference, instead of stirring up passion and speculation.

Re:There's several catches

[porcupine8]

The tricky part is that each individual cancer must have a particular treatment created for it. It's not a generic cancer cure, but rather one that can be targeted against certain very specific types of cancer.

But that's true of most cancer treatments. You don't just get generic chemotherapy, you get a specific chemo regimen for your specific type of cancer. What works on one type doesn't work on others - which is why some cancers have 80+% survival rates and others are more around 10%.

It is important for people to realize this - that we'll probably never have "a cure for cancer" but only cures for specific cancers - but it's not unique to this treatment.

not Diamond Age

[cahiha]

Sorry, but this is standard molecular biology and polymer chemistry, the way it's been done for decades. It has nothing to do with "nanotechnology".

Nanotechnology, as in the Diamond Age, refers to a new class of self-replicating molecular devices. Nanotechnology was overhyped, has delivered no scientific insights, and has been a complete failure. That is why its proponents are now going around and trying to relabel work in material science and biology, work that happens to be at the right scale, as "nanotechnology".