Slashdot Mirror
Carbon Nanotubes Can Exist Safely Inside the Body, Help Treat Cancer
iandoh writes "A team of scientists at Stanford University has tracked the movement of carbon nanotubes through the digestive systems of mice. They've determined that the nanotubes do not exhibit any toxicity in the mice, and are safely expelled after delivering their payload. As a result, the study paves the way toward future applications of nanotubes in the treatment of illnesses. Previous research by the same team demonstrated that nanotubes can be used to fight cancer. The nanotubes do this in two ways. One method involves shining laser light on the nanotubes, which generates heat to destroy cancer cells. Another method involves attaching medicine to the nanotubes, which are able to accurately 'find' cancerous cells without impacting healthy cells."
have they got the space elevator working yet?
Faster than a pumping heart...stronger than graphite capable of delivering it's payload then leaving safely...it's CARBON NANO-TUBE MAN! With the power to...reflect lasers! and deliver medicine!
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
Finally, something useful getting delivered via the 'tubes!
Since carbon nanotubes don't exhibit any toxicity, I can imagine that future nanites would be made out of this material.
....they come from a series of tubes!
Queue whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag in 3... 2... 1...
Every technology has to start somewhere. How many people 100 years ago would have thought it possible that the people of the future would have magic electric devices that allowed them to communicate through the air and all the way across the world? Small steps, small steps...
As a side note, the cancers that aren't curable aren't curable yet. I welcome anything that helps to move humanity free of cancer.
We've all got nanotubes inside us doing various medical things. Will this bring a new age of IR lasers? What about taking pictures with night vision turned on? Anyone would be able to see all your diseased areas
Another paper out this week seems to directly contradict that headline.
What Dai (the Stanford professor) is actually claiming is that specially functionalized nanotubes gather at the back end of the digestive tract, and seem to dissapear. Pure nanotubes cause all sorts of problems. There's an important distinction there, but this is still good news for nanotube (and cancer) research.
The technology does seem useful. At present, all they are doing is cooking the cells. But if you can coat a nanotube with various compounds, you can coat it with toxins tied by a heat labile bond. Cook to release, and poison the cancer cell.
How many people 100 years ago would have thought it possible that the people of the future would have magic electric devices that allowed them to communicate through the air and all the way across the world?
The educated ones, certainly. Since Marconi made a transatlantic telegraph transmission in 1902. 106 years ago.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Much like the scientists working on the nanotubes/people familiar with the technology do today?
Hmmm... so it doesn't react to anything, and it travels around the body and gets excreted. However, nanotubes are still indestructible. They are probably causing cellular damage traveling everywhere in the body. This will force cell repair machinery to become more active, which will lead to an eventual increase in the rates of cancer. Still... if engineers can make miniature robots with nanotubes, it'll be cool. As long as they prevent or treat more cancers than they cause.
No, more like the people who read a newspaper. In 1903, Pres. Teddy had a telegraphed conversation with the King of England. From Massachusetts. It was a big deal in the papers.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
From TFA, it appears these are single wall nanotubes, which are a lot more expensive and difficult to produce than multiple wall nanotubes. i'd be interested to see if these could pass through the mouse, as they are more reactive than the single walled variety
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
But can it find my keys without destroying the surrounding environment and then deliver the payload back to me?
Ah, and so everybody at the time envisioned cell phones, for example? I posit (and use as evidence the "far future tech" of communicators in Star Trek) that they did not. Yet cell phones are the logical evolution of that telegraphed conversation.
I submit, sir, that you are incorrect.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Does that mean the internets will go faster?
Yeah of course I've tested it
I mean, really?
:(){
There are a lot of methods for targeting cancer cells (basically, targeted poison delivery systems). The problem is, there are few superficial features of cancers cells which on a molecular level different from normal cells. There will always be some toxicity to the healthy cells because it is very hard to target cancer cells selectively.
The real problem with nanotubes is that they have the ability to penetrate the cell wall and act as artificial channels. This is bad, especially, because the tubes naturally will pump charged ions in'n'out of the cell, which lead to all sorts of problems.
Hongjie Dai, co-author of the study, had this to say about the study:
"One of the longstanding problems in medicine is how to cure cancer without harming normal body tissue."
I do not have a medical background, but what I know about cancer is that its causes are often rooted in any combination of lifetime exposure to carcinogens, dietary decisions, family history--you name it. In other words, people get cancer for reasons that can't possibly be addressed by running small tubes through their bodies.
Isn't this really just yet another potential treatment for cancer, and not by any means a cure for it? Isn't it the case that a patient with cancer could undergo extensive nanotube treatment, rid of every cancerous cell, only to have the cancer reappear due to any of the aforementioned factors?
Is this really just a semantic mistake (i.e. "Hongjie Dai" may not understand every nuanced term in the English language or just misspoke), or would this procedure really be marketed and used as a permanent cure for one of the world's worst killers?Wouldn't they be more useful if they actually killed the mice? I hate messing with the traps.
SINGLE WALL nanotubes do no harm? That is really surprised me because single wall nanotubes are a lot thinner than multiwall and most of the worries have been about them acting like tiny katanas and slicing up cell membranes. A while back someone made an antiseptic coating using carbon nanotube set up like a tiny sharp as hell bed of nails. Another worry was that biomolecules, DNA, RNA, proteins, etc might wrap around single wall nanotubes and gum up cellular machinery. In fact someone used this property to make a nifty little mercury sensor. See more here http://www.news.uiuc.edu/NEWS/06/0126nanotubes.html Of course the nanotubes were coated with polyethylene glycol to prevent stuff like this from happening, so nanotubes might still be toxic uncoated. There definitely needs to be another study done on nanotube toxicity to confirm the results.
Well that's it. Now that the old form to view threads is gone, it is pretty much impossible to read slashdot over dial-up. Well done guys, nice work. I hope you like your goofy looking AJAX thingy. Do you feel trendy? Are you cool like the other kids now? Well I hope you're happy, but slashdot is now unreadable over dial-up. (and barely readable on high-speed) And just I love how that javascript locks the entire browser while it executes (up to several minutes on dial-up). Bye, Bye Slashdot. I wonder if disabling javascript or Lynx might render it readable? Or is Slashdot lost and gone forever now?
Thats great ease to those who have cancers...
Showing them that it exists, and having them independently decide it would be possible absent any evidence are two completely different things. You've subtly changed the argument to make a point that was never in contention.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Both of the applications mentioned are old, respected and not very easy to implement. I've known people who've worked on various versions of them--attaching molecules that are going to be absorbed by cancerous cells to dyes or radioactive payloads, then hoping they selectively destroy the bad cells. The idea's gone far enough that companies get funding, but obviously the approach hasn't produced a silver bullet. I don't see any reason that using carbon nanotubes will make things easier than using traditional carbon-based (ie, organic) molecules--in fact, if I had to guess, I would have said they are likely to be less selective and more difficult to work with.
I don't mean to imply that the idea's not worth pursuing, but like many research programs I suspect this is getting press because it's a good story (buzzwords + easy to explain mechanism), not because it's more likely to succeed than various other therapies.
So is iamlegend the new replacement for whatcouldpossiblygowrong ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
They can't fail the mayor, not ever....
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
forget Marconi ..it was determined in court that he stole or was inspired at least by Tesla's blueprints...the latter envisioned even the internet and much much more
Voice over radio was first practiced in 1900. It actually existed, in practice, then. Wireless telecommunications have changed a great deal in the last 100 years, but those are differences in degree. I communicate voice over radio waves like Fessenden did ~107 years ago.
If you were to draw any conclusions from Star Trek, it's probably be that the show's creators had no insight into the impact of miniaturization or that the prop department preferred doctored household items to custom designed and manufactured props. It certainly doesn't tell you what the people of the 60's were thinking, much less the people of 1908. Much of the "far future" technology of star trek had nothing on the technology of (say) Dick Tracy. Were the relevant aspects of Star Trek technology any more advanced than that depicted on the Batman TV series airing contemporaneously?
Going back to the original question: Answer: All of them that could read. There's no need for you to apply your assumptions about people living 60 years after the fact based on a TV show to answer this question.
"Carbon Nanotubes Can Exist Safely Inside the Body, Help Treat Cancer"
/pedant
Surely you mean "Carbon Nanotubes Can Exist Safely Inside the Body AND Help Treat Cancer"?
Unless, "help treat cancer" is a seperate sentence in the form of a request (well, if there's anything I can do, I'll help..)
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
We are the Borg (c).
Resistance is futile.
'Nuff said
Even if carbon nanotubes are somehow toxic, so are current chemotherapies for certain cancers!
Do you often leave your keys in your digestive tract?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Even if they don't do any damage to the body, is there any chance of them doing damage to the environment once they are 'expelled'?
Technoli
I don't know when the space elevator will be ready.
But from what I deduce from TFA, once the elevator is there, it will probably be edible !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The gut is rather an easy situation :
Normally, things go through the gut from one end (mouth) to the other (toilet seet) without much hassle, unless there's either a specific receptor or transporter for it (sugar), or it's chemical properties facilitates cross the gut wall (mainly : water can go around cell and hyrdophobic substance (fat) can go through the cell walls).
Nano tube aren't by definition neither water nor small fatty molecule, and as they're synthetic, the probability that some receptor will recognize and bind them is rather low.
Thus TFA seems plausible. But as you point out, not everyone agrees with those results. More research might be needed.
With lung, the situation is different :
Above a given threshold size (sorry, I did have to memorise it exactly for my medical studies but have since then forgotten), the respiratory tract function as some kind of "filter" and is able to stop them and reject them either back outside (by coughing) or to the gut (by swalloing), thank to the ciliated cells on the tract walls and associated mucus movement (which acts as some minature conveyor belt). (Except in smokers where the ciliated cells are paralyzed).
Under some threshold, smaller enough particles may manage to reach the end of the tract to the alveolar sacs.
Normally, specialised dust cells (some lung-specific kind of marcophage) will eat and digest them to destroy them.
Now the problems with nano tube is that they're not your usual microparticles : they're engineered to be indestructible, so the macrophage will have a hard time trying to destroy them.
This is what happens with asbestos, for exemple. Asbestos reaches the alveolar sas. Macrophage "eat it" but fail to digest it (asbestos fiber were made to be used as fire-resistant). Macrophage end up over-eating and exploding. Which releases the asbestos back and causes inflammation (both because the asbestos it self is irritant, and because of the macrophage breakage) in the lungs (asbestosis).
That's something we need to closely test with nanotube :
- are the size of most common nanotube construct under the threshold to reach the alveolar sacs ? (or will we, one day, mostly use nano technology to build huge nanobot - huge on the scale of dust particle, of course - that won't be able to reach the end of the respiratory tract).
- do animal studies show that dust cell somewhat manage to get rid of the tubes ? or do the tube accumulate and cause inflammation just like
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
What the heck does a noodle and cheese dish have to do with a band from the 70's and 80's? (other than the "cheese")
Oh, Wait...
Nevermind.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
We should just make nanosharks out of carbon and attach the lasers to their heads to hunt the cancer.
So they progress enough to use nanotubes in humans for drug delivery and the nanotubes are excreted from the digestive system.
When the waste is processed in the municipal sewage facility, the nanotubes aren't captured in the purification process and pass on to the ecosystem as effluent.
Will these nanotubes have the robustness to survive in the wild? Will they get clogged in fish gills causing them to suffocate?
What other mayhem may we be missing by not looking at the whole life cycle of nanoparticles in such experiments?
All the really great sigs are already taken.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Shouldn't it be, "look less than gorgeous visually," or "sound less than gorgeous aurally?"
How does something sound visually? Is he on drugs? And if so, why isn't he sharing?
In your last dying breathe you can claim to never have had your diseased heart's photo taken. That way you can take your privacy to the grave.
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?