Sound Waves Kill Skin and Prostate Cancer Cells

Anonymous Coward writes "A recent Study in the British Journal of Cancer shows that the use of Quercitin and 20KHz ultrasound for 60 seconds killed skin and prostate cancer cells. 90% of the abnormal cells were dead within 48hrs. Since low frequency ultrasound was previously shown to enhance the skin penetration of topical substances up to 1000 times, it would seem that a topical Quercetin cream with a low frequency ultrasound wand might be just the ticket for those annoying little skin cancers that tend to occur in older geeks who have spent a bit of time in the sun."

Comments

Killing cancer?

[ZaBu911]

Sounds great!

Re:Wow

[(negative video)]

geeks who have spent a bit of time in the sun

They exist?

What is this "sun" of which you speak?

Misleading headline

[TeknoHog]

I didn't even RTFA, but it seems from the summary that the sound itself doesn't kill the cancer cells -- it helps the drug penetrate into the tissue.

Picky, picky.

[twitter]

There's not much to read besides abstracts and that's too bad. One of the abstracts said it well:

Pretreatment of cells with ultrasound (20 kHz, 2 W cm(-2), 60 s) selectively induced cytotoxicity in skin and prostate cancer cells, while having minimal effect on corresponding normal cell lines.

Selective toxicity is what cancer treatment is all about, so while the sound man not "kill" cancer, it's a promising treatment.

It would be nice to see the actual studies. I'd like to see the statistics, and see if any other methods were tried and the researcher's reasoning. It may be that dysplastic cells are susceptible to sonic damage and this might work with other therapy methods, such as xray or heat. I'd also like to know how they treated prostate cancer, which is the number two cancer killer of men in the US.