Slashdot Mirror
Golden Nanocages To Put the Heat On Cancer Cells
ElectricSteve writes "Researchers have been searching for a highly targeted medical treatment that attacks cancer cells but leaves healthy tissue alone. The approach taken by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis is to use 'gold nanocages' that, when injected, selectively accumulate in tumors. When the tumors are later bathed in laser light, the surrounding tissue is barely warmed, but the nanocages convert light to heat, killing the malignant cells. ... Although the tumors took up enough gold nanocages to give them a black cast, only 6 percent of the injected particles accumulated at the tumor site. They would like that number to be closer to 40 percent so that fewer particles would have to be injected. They plan to attach tailor-made ligands to the nanocages that recognize and lock onto receptors on the surface of the tumor cells. ... The scientists at WUSTL have just received a five-year, $2.1M grant from the National Cancer Institute to continue their work with photothermal therapy." Note that Gizmag features a stupid Subscribe nag that covers your screen after about a minute; sounds like a job for NoScript. Last year we discussed somewhat similar research using titanium dioxide nanoparticles to target a particular kind of brain cancer.
So gold and money cure sickness. That's a news!
Votator.com implements a fair voting scheme (free
This reminds me of reading about the middle ages practice of the wealthy eating powdered precious and semi precious metals and gemstones to cure ailments.
of course with cancer gone we will see many more old age illnesses due to an unnaturally long life. it'd be a nice problem to have i guess, to have people live so long that we hit biological age limitations.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This is similar in principle to the Kanzius machine -- same idea, dope the cancer with some kind of radiation-sensitive material, then blast it. Kanzius wanted to use radio waves, but didn't know how to dope the cancer, but his oncologist knew a researcher at MD Anderson Cancer Center who was treating Nobel Laureate Rick Smalley -- one of the inventors of C-60, aka Buckminsterfullerene. Turns out that's a pretty good radiation target!
Sounds like these guys are on to the same basic concept with lasers and gold. Targeted doping of cancer cells seems like a very promising concept.
6%? What happened with the remaining 94%? Did they accumulate elsewhere (and then the whole thing is so far an epic fail)?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Gold is still used to treat arthritis. Since arthritis is a hodge podge of ailments it doesn't always work though.
However a doctor in Vancouver Canada said:
"Nothing works as well as gold, when gold works".
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If you can irradiate it with a laser then you can see it. So why not just cut the bastard out? Or hit it with an ion beam which does much more damage than a laser and is just as selective as the gold nanocage method?
This message was scanned by European governments and contains no terrorism.
The cancer industry has no incentive to find a cancer cure.
There's no such thing as a cancer cure until the day we can re-write our genetic code to prevent mutation due to time, transcription errors, ionizing radiation and interference from thousands of different chemicals. Therefore the "cancer industry" knows it is in no danger of being put out of business - ever. There is no conspiracy - you just have to understand what cancer is and how it happens to realize that it will always be a part of human life. If you live long enough, cancer is almost guaranteed.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There's no such thing as a cancer cure until the day we can re-write our genetic code to prevent mutation due to time, transcription errors, ionizing radiation and interference from thousands of different chemicals.
You're looking at it from the wrong angle: I doubt you could ever prevent "transcription errors, ionizing radiation and interference from thousands of different chemicals" from happening. A cancer cure would not be about that, but rather about minimizing the damage after it happens. For example by killing (or even repairing?) damaged cells before they turn into runaway growth.
And how, exactly, do you propose to do that? Your body's own immune system can't do it, and it's had a 65 million year head start.
naked mole rats never get cancer.
Your body tries this every day, and in general it works fine. When a severely damaged cell (one that is not necrotic) can't undergo apoptosis (cell suicide for the uninitiated, done because it's either outlived its usefulness in the body or it has severe, irreversible damage) a natural killer cell then will endocytose it. Failing that theoretically impenetrable wall of defense, you get cancer. Here's to finding you beating the oldest arms race in the medical industry, millions of years in the making.
Ok, I think I understand. It's sort of a Golden Shower of nanocages that bathes the tumors in a reactive substance? Fun.
Mozy, free online backup service
--
This is another form of photodynamic therapy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photodynamic_therapy
The problem has always to find a chemical which would accumulate in tumors and not in healthy tissures and would also respond to radiation by generating cell-killing chemicals. Not an easy couple of parameters to satisfy.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Oh how I miss you.
Sort of.
guest@potato:~$ ftp wuarchive.wustl.edu
ftp: connect: Connection timed out
ftp>
The cancer industry has no incentive to find a cancer cure.
There was a cure for cancer to be announced at a press conference on the 54th floor of WTC 2 on 9/11/2001.
It was a graphic lesson to all who might be tempted to slip the leash of the cancer industry.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Did those millions of years help us get to the moon ?
Not understating the near impossibility of a complete treatment, but citing the failure of the immune system is not how you do it. Also, remember that many illnesses only appeared after the industrial revolution. It's the price of civilization.
They have been researching this for _years_. The grant may be news, granted. But the technique itself?
This is a cool variation on a basic idea that's been used before, and will make a great payload for cancer treatment. However, killing cancer cells is not all that difficult; rather targeting cancer cells is hard. It's all about the therapeutic index, i.e. the ratio of damage done to cancer cells against damage done to healthy tissue.
:).
Talking about cancer as "a disease" is a big misnomer; at best it's a huge family of diseases (really nice explanation in this comic). Patterns do emerge -- certain tissues tend to have similar patterns of gene expression between people and therefore tend to give rise to similar cancers -- but each cancer that arises comes about in a different way, and evolves in response to different selective pressures within the body. The biggest of these pressures are fairly obvious like the need for neutrients (so "successful" cancers are the ones that evolve the ability to encourage blood vessels to grow around them) and evading the immune system. So, almost by definition, the outside of a cancer cell is forced to look as similar as possible to the outside or a healthy cell in the same tissue, to avoid detection.
There are some exploitable internal differences. Most cancers (but by no means all, or even close to all) express hTERT, a gene responsible for repairing the telomeres, whose degradation would otherwise limit the cells' replication. So some researchers (including my former lab) are working on techniques to exploit that e.g. viruses that can only kill cells expressing hTERT. The downside is that some legitimate cells also express hTERT, most notably your stem cells (bone marrow, some other tissues).
Another popular method is just targeting all cells that are highly metabolically active. Cancer cells tend to be working unusually hard (most cells in your body just sit there gently ticking over most of the time), so some cancer therapies target any cells that are burning through a lot of glucose (e.g. radiolabelled glucose is used as a source for imaging techniques like Positron Emission Tomography) or that are doing a lot of DNA replication as part of cell division. Again, though, this targets many cells in your body which are working this hard as a normal part of their programmes.
So, yeah, this is a cool payload but targeting is the hard part. If we knew what ligands to tie these particles to for targeting and how to persuade these huge particles to move against a pressure gradient and through a dense, disorganised extra-cellular matrix, cancers wouldn't be half the problem that they actually are. We could be using targeted viruses (piece of piss to do if you know what you're targeting and the surrounding tissue isn't too dense), metal nanoparticles, targeted liposomes (little hollow balls of fat) containing toxins or toxin precursors, modified antibodies to alert the immune system to the cancer cells, etc, etc.
Curing a cancer would be pretty easy: throw enough researchers and resources at one patient's specific tumour and we'll come up with a damn fine treatment. But curing all cancers -- different tumours arising from different tissues in different patients -- is seriously hard. We'll see fantastic advances in treating specific cancer types, but I seriously doubt that "a cure for cancer" is possible within our lifetimes. Although, heh, if you prove me wrong I won't be too upset
I don't know if you exactly know what a Golden Shower is, but I prefer you not to spray my lawn...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
A cancer cure would not be about that, but rather about minimizing the damage after it happens.
Sorry to split hairs but you're talking about a cancer TREATMENT, not a cure.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Heck, JFK had a cancer cure way back in the 60's. Who do you think was on that grassy knoll? That's right: The Cancer Industry!
Why don't they just use regular nanocages with little Yves-Saint-Laurent logos on them?
If you can just zap the thing with a laser through the body to kill the tumor and not the surrounding tissue why would you go through the effort to cut it out of the person doing much more harm to surrounding tissue?
And how, exactly, do you propose to do that? Your body's own immune system can't do it, and it's had a 65 million year head start.
With cool nanomachines, of course. And the most part of that 65 million years wasn't spent on fighting cancer, but other stuff that would kill me sooner. Cancer is a relatively recent problem, I think. And even then, most of that time my immune system has probably been plotting against me, so that I wouldn't live too long and compete of resources with my offspring.
Abraham Lincoln was to give an address from his balcony at intermission about the cure for cancer he discovered. But who was John Wilkes Booth? That's right! The Cancer Industry!
The Doktors used to put those big-ass radiation pellets into your prostate. NOW they put those LITTLE-ass radiation pellets into your prostate. Better Living Thru Chemistry???
"You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose... but you can't pick your friend's nose."
So it kills the symbiotic bacteria as well...
What about the Japanese maitake mushroom ? http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NAH/is_6_31/ai_80088291/