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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."
How do they get the horse so small?
-- Jessica Simpson
Trojans infect my system
Therefore Windows = Cancer
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.
I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. How many of these suckers can I fit in a Library of Congress?
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
The real news here, if I can interpret the press release correctly, is not that the nanoparticle is the trojan horse, but that its small size *allowed* the researchers to construct the trojan horse.
The article summary is a bit brief- basically, cancer needs a lot of folate. Moreso than normal cells. These folks attached both an anti-cancer drug and a bunch of folate to a nanoparticle, which, due to both its small size and tasty-looking folate, is able to enter cells and deliver the anti-cancer payload rather than slowly diffuse it through the cell wall.
This is still a bit of a shotgun approach, as normal cells still get targetted to some extent, but *much* less so than previous methods.
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.
From TFA:
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Lastly, some folks asked about what happens to all those dendrimers when they've done their job.
Sure, this might make you feel uncomfortable, but guess what will make you feel even more uncomfortable? Having your body bombarded by potentially levels of radiation so high that it is potentially fatal.
There are so many ways to improve upon killing humans. Is one more way really worth worrying about? So someone has found a better way to diliver a chemical payload into a human cell. Certainly I bet someone can figure out how to make said payload lethal. Who cares though? We already have chemical and viruses sitting around that can kill within seconds. It is like worrying that some nation went from owning 5000 to 10,000 nuclear weapons, or worrying about getting shot 100 times rather then 50. If genocide is your goal, the tools are already avaliable.
I personally am excited at the prospect of a new treatments like the one outlined. Dead is dead. You can throw HF in my face or you can throw your nano-poisonin my face. Either way, the outcome is the same. On the other hand, nanomedicen is not chemo. Chemo has the potential to be almost as bad as the cancer. If a nanomedicen can kill cancer and do less harm to my body, I am all for it, paranoia be damned.