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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."
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!
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.
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!
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.
So is iamlegend the new replacement for whatcouldpossiblygowrong ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
You're confusing a vaccine and a cure, as well as universal and specific cures. You seem to find cure and vaccine synonymous, which they are not. A vaccine will prevent the formation of a disease state and a cure will... cure it. A cure is not effective until the disease state is reached. And in both cases medical technology generally does not have a one-off of either of them. An easy example would be the flu vaccine. It only contains the top percentage of the previous year's bugs (i.e. the most prevalent last year). Getting the flu vaccine still leaves you with a measurable chance of catching a flu if you get one that is a) heavily mutated or b) is from a few years back and is not represented in the current sample.
Treatments are different and can be more universal because they focus on ameliorating the disease state rather than curing. Chemotherapy, for instance, would be considered a more universal treatment because it is good against a number of different cancers. It is not much of a cure since the success rate isn't too high, as far as I know. Treatments are often hammers that are aimed at identifying most of the nail-looking-things and making them go away a little bit.
Also, just because a cancer may have a number of different causes that does not imply that the underlying pathology is different. If you look at a number of different research paths into cancer physiology and development, there are findings that many cancers exhibit specific morphologies and surface markers. Of course the research is difficult and there are always people who get a different answer from you. If carbon nano-tubes do exhibit the capability to make ion-channels and we can get them to target cancerous surface markers, it's clear we've made a way to destroy target cells without releasing a toxin which would be dangerous to otherwise healthy cells. Unfortunately biomedical engineering is easy to say what needs/should be done (I should know, it's my major) but alot harder to actually do.
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
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