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Nanotech Trojan Horse That Kills Cancer
An anonymous reader writes "University of Michigan scientists have created the nanotechnology equivalent of a Trojan horse to smuggle a powerful chemotherapeutic drug inside tumor cells - increasing the drug's cancer-killing activity and reducing its toxic side effects." From the article: "The drug delivery vehicle used by U-M scientists is a manmade polymer molecule called a dendrimer. Less than five nanometers in diameter, these dendrimers are small enough to slip through tiny openings in cell membranes. One nanometer equals one-billionth of a meter, which means it would take 100,000 nanometers lined up side-by-side to equal the diameter of a human hair."
Or does this chemical only attack cancer cells, and the dendromere helps it into all cells?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
In case you are like me and you just want to know how they targetted the cancer cells, this is a very brief rundown:
All cells require folate to survive. Cancer cells suck up folate like it's crack. They put the poison in the folate. All cells absorb some of the poisoned folate. Cancer cells absorb most of it.
Pretty nice idea, but it made me wonder about the push to get expectent mothers to take excessive amounts of folic acid (folate). Does that make them more prone to cancer by giving the cancer cells extra food?
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Nice to see this start to happen.
.1% of it, and also enable us to up the dose as relevant only to the affected parts.
Based on what I understand of nano-tech and the human body, I think we're going to see a lot more of this, and this will be the first medical nanotech revolution: Creating drugs that are targetted only at the things they are supposed to affect.
Imagine wrapping, say, kidney drugs in a nanotech container that only opens in the kindeys, and is otherwise harmless. Or imagine an anti-inflammatory that only targets inflamed areas.
This will cut down a lot on undesirable side-effects caused by flooding the entire body with something to affect
This obviously doesn't apply to everything, but this is the first advance I expect to actually get used. We're a long way from lil' machines that can safely clean out plaque from our arteries (though we recently saw some advances towards doing it unsafely this last week), but this is quite doable, I think.
Is this a biodegradable polymer?
How hard is it to attach molecules to these tree-like structures? If these polymer dendrimer are exposed to various other molecules will some bond naturally, or do they have to be tailored to a specific molecule?
Does that mean that in potential future patients, any free/unabsorbed nanoparticles will be excreted into the public sewage systems, and being (I assume) unfilterable, thereby enter the earths water cycle?
So when you put those together, will these nanoparticles be able to float freely in our oceans and rivers, their dendrimers bonding with molecules found in nature, and then if conditions are right potentially take those molecules inside our cell walls?
I know - the actual number of these things for cancer patients will be really small, but workable techniques tend to get expanded, and if they don't break down they'll just pile up over time. I'm not qualified to do anything but ask these questions, I'm just wondering whether there's any reasonable risk that once these hit the outside world they could turn around and be just as effective at delivering cancer-causing agents they pick up randomly from the environment.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
In light of my feeble attempts at college level logic courses I find your post very amusing. You appeal to the flaw in my arguement by way of reference to modern positivist emiricism. And yet on the other hand, you sig is a postmodern, postpositivist appeal to something along the lines of structural relativism. Whoa, I'm freakin' out man...
The term "nanotechnology" has entered the public lexicon, much like the word "nuclear" in the middle of the 20th century. As soon as that happens, researchers start calling everything "nanotechnology" because a bunch of senators see a presentation from the RAND corporation that says "nanotechnology" can do this if we fund it at level X or this if we fund it at level Y and they create things like the "nanotechnology" initiative. Now the fields of biochemistry, chemistry, and molecular biology fall under the broad definition of "nanotechnology" and because engineers and physicists want a piece I routinely see slides of micrographs labeled "nano_____". I understand the need for funding, but I'm so @#$% sick of nano- motors, latters, elevators, delivery systems, power plants, putians, pumps, gears, etc. plastered on everyone's research that 4 years ago would have been called supramolecular, polymer, or materials. Its nice to see clever things like this (which BTW is not unique to this lab, there are entire conferences on dendrimers now) that actually seem to work, but aren't really nanotechnology. Sure dendrimers are on the nanometer scale, but if we run around calling everything that is nanscale "nanotechnology" what will the point of words like polymer, protein, macromelecule, or even nanoscale be anymore? Well, maybe I just need to get with the times. All I ever hear from people in suits is how we need to "rebrand chemistry" and start making flashy presentations that will play well in layman's publications. I'd like to roll their ties up and cram them down their far-too-often-open mouths, but I seem to be in the minority as far more people are using pretty pictures and stupid puns, cliches, and analogies to hype their research than adhering to the old "scientists are modest; the research speaks for itself" philosophy.
Now that my rant is done, on with this whole business of idiots protesting stuff they don't understand. Two examples, genetic engineering: ok through artificial selection (tomatoes, chickens, dogs, corn... basically everything humans have domesticated), evil through "cloning" which they don't even know the definition of. Nuclear: bad, bad, bad, unless it is to keep the Reds at bay. Like how Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging was rebranded Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) because (seriously) people wouldn't stick their heads inside something with the word "nuclear" in it (yeah, those processing nuclear spins are going to kill you)... Anyway so thanks to people spreading fear and paranoia under the banner of "nanotechnology" involving tiny robots that consume matter at the atomic level or little nanothingers that enter your body and control your mind, coupled with the desire to pile gobs of scientific research under the same banner (to get funding) we wind up with hippies protesting pants. In some ways paranoia is a good thing becuase it helps us stay skeptical, but c'mon... pants? So the way I see it, that is how dendrimers which don't significantly differ chemically from styrofoam, platic bags, ketchup bottles, or any other man-made macromolecule wind up the inadvertant target public fear, despite having great technological potential. I suppose it is like stem cell research in that ideology (i.e. preconceived notions) trump fact, reality, common sense, and science.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.