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Nanomaterials Used in Possible Cancer Cure

Posted by timothy on from the dern-fancy-doodads dept.

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."

5 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Wish this were available Right Now. by danamania · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!)

    1. Re:Wish this were available Right Now. by justins · · Score: 4, Insightful
      (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.
      --
      Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
  2. You're insane by flyingsquid · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:You're insane by flyingsquid · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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.

  3. not Diamond Age by cahiha · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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".