First Anti-Cancer Nanoparticle Trial On Humans a Success

An anonymous reader writes "Nanoparticles have been able to disable cancerous cells in living human bodies for the first time. The results are perfect so far, killing tumors with no side effects whatsoever. Mark Davis, project leader at CalTech, says that 'it sneaks in, evades the immune system, delivers the siRNA, and the disassembled components exit out.' Truly amazing."

Comments

Re:Not just cancer!

[wizardforce]

RNAi is an ancient anti-viral defense mechanism found in everything from plants to humans. That said, I agree. Any disease that is caused by the production of a given protein could in principle be treated using a derivative of this RNAi nanoparticle technology.
 

Now we just need to figure out how to change people's DNA on the fly

Viruses come close to this, it is just a matter of expanding what they can do (eg. enlarging their payload) and reducing the incidence of side effects like severe immune reactions.

Re:Targetting

[MichaelSmith]

Incorrect. There are significant physiological and genetic differences between cancerous cells and normal cells. It would be entirely possible to target the RNA sequence to only bind to malignant cells and ignore normal ones.

Yeah but chemotherapy and radiotherapy work the same way. The problem is that the characteristic of cancerous cells they bind to is the fact that they grow fast. The problem is that these treatments also damage normally fast growing tissues. My father in law lost all his bone marrow that way.

I hope that these nanoparticles don't bind to any other crucial tissues.

Re:Too small a sample size

[BenVis]

Thanks for the overview of the clinical trials procedure. You clearly know a lot about it. One thing I wanted to point out is that while placebo-controlled designs are probably the most reliable, in many contexts (including a cancer treatment) it would be unethical to give patients a placebo (i.e. a treatment expected to do nothing) rather than a treatment that might actually help them.

Basically, if there is a treatment that is known to be at least somewhat effective, that's your control rather than a placebo. It might be that the definition of placebo has shifted to include any standard non-experimental treatment, but that would be news to me.