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Injecting Liquid Metal Into Blood Vessels Could Help Kill Tumors
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes One of the most interesting emerging treatments for certain types of cancer aims to starve the tumor to death. The strategy involves destroying or blocking the blood vessels that supply a tumor with oxygen and nutrients. Without its lifeblood, the unwanted growth shrivels up and dies. This can be done by physically blocking the vessels with blood clots, gels, balloons, glue, nanoparticles and so on. However, these techniques have never been entirely successful because the blockages can be washed away by the blood flow and the materials do not always fill blood vessels entirely, allowing blood to flow round them. Now Chinese researchers say they've solved the problem by filling blood vessels with an indium-gallium alloy that is liquid at body temperature. They've tested the idea in the lab on mice and rabbits. Their experiments show that the alloy is relatively benign but really does fill the vessels, blocks the blood flow entirely and starves the surrounding tissue of oxygen and nutrients. The team has also identified some problems such as the possibility of blobs of metal being washed into the heart and lungs. Nevertheless, they say their approach is a promising injectable tumor treatment.
Well, The side effect might be you're going to die a horribly painful dead, but hey at least you're free from that god awful cancer...
Those tumors could be terminated.
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the baklava!
this won't do well in primate/human safety trials.
I don't suppose anything will work at later stages where the cells are everywhere... especially not that.
Possible wolverine on the horizon?
...Robert Patrick simply smiled impishly as he replied, "no comment."
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Having blobs of liquid metal flowing to the heart seems like a show stopper to me. I'm intrigued by the old-school-mad-scientist aspect of this idea, but the potential risks seem a bit serious.
"Have you seen this boy?"
I'm guessing that they're talking about benign tumours - how would this work with a malignant tumour or metastatic cancer?
If you get the chance, watch "Autopsy - Life & Death". It's a bit gory, but well worth it for the explanation in one episode about the difference between benign and metastatic tumours.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Lots of things are relatively benign compared to cancer -- but I'm not sure this is one of them.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Aside from the risks of what happens to the liquid metal after it's done its job, you also end up with a big lump of dead cells inside the body, which can't be good. On the other hand, presumably successful radiation therapy has the same result, and the result doesn't have to be 'good', it just has to be 'better than having a tumor'. Would someone with actual medical knowledge care to comment?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I'm a radiology resident who is at least moderately familiar with embolic agents.
We already have a liquid embolic agent that solidifies slowly called Onyx. It is only approved for arteriovenous malformations in the central nervous system, but it is used off label for other indications, including tumor embolization: http://www.ajnr.org/content/34... [American Journal of Neuroradiology]. The English on the actual liquid metal article is pretty rough and I soon grew tired of trying to decipher it, but from what I did manage to read I cannot see this doing anything better than Onyx already does.
With regards to embolization to the heart and pulmonary arteries, this happens occasionally with any embolic agent. The cardiovascular system, like the internet, is a series of tubes and the pulmonary capillaries are a fine network of blood vessels that routinely catch tiny blood clots without you even noticing it. It's big emboli that you need to worry about.
Qian and co first tested the cytotoxicity of gallium and indium by allowing cells to grow in its presence and measuring the number that survive after 48 hours. If more than 75 per cent, a substance is deemed safe by China’s national standards.
After 48 hours just over 75 percent of cells in both samples were still alive
The experiments also reveal a number of potential problems, however. X-rays of the rabbit they injected clearly show that blobs of liquid metal found their way to the animal’s heart and lungs.
What’s more, their experiments also show blood vessel growth around the blocked arteries, revealing how quickly the body adapts to blockages.
At least it's easy to conduct research in China. Maybe they'll find something.
What I want to know is, why didn't they try wax or oil first?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
When all you need is Rick Simpson Oil
I mailed beta-feedback@slashdot.org a while ago using a single-use mail address. Now I get recruitment spam.
Beta is bad, spam is worse.
Isn't it illegal to send commercial mail without opt-in? What can I do about this?
You're trying too hard.
"Injecting Liquid Metal Into Blood Vessels Could Help Kill Tumors"
A large enough dose of cyanide is guaranteed to kill all tumors someone may have. The health of the patient is, of course, not guaranteed.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
When you see a claim that a common drug or vitamin "kills cancer cells in a petri dish," keep in mind: So does a handgun.
Probably better than having Mercury up your ass, and then getting AIDS
Liquid Metal --- Cyanide.
One of these things is not like the other.
I'm going to wait until someone who isn't essentially gambling with their patients' lives without informed consent can review these findings.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Unless the cancer is in your liver or renal system.
Then switching to a ketonic diet will poison you in a matter of days.
Always consult a health professional before doing ANYTHING radical with your body. :D
As I'm getting older, I want to say that I do not give my consent to have sodium metal injected. It might be a bit dangerous.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
We cured your husband's cancer but we accidentally vegetablised him by blocking a few veins in his brain with liquid metal.
Terminator 2 called and claimed the patent rights on killing...
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Dear God, why didn't we think of this sooner? It seems like great inventions are always like that -- so obvious that they're hiding in plain sight. It's like the paperclip, or One Click Payments! Obviously this got the old mental juices flowing, so here are some other things that I'm pretty sure can kill tumors:
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Will the side effects simply lead to death in another way?
Will the quality of the time bought, if any, be worth it?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Prayer kills tumors, as it is God that creates and heals tumors. Reducing the ego to be in balance with the world and living in harmony with nature, kills tumors. The tumor is intelligent, and the only reason why it's killing you is because it decided you are no good. If it thinks you are good, it will sustain you, instead of harming you. Cyanide, or liquid metal or what not, are just protocol, they can kill or heal, and it's up in the air either way. By the way, these are asians, I wonder how many monkeys they injected with liquid metal to come up with this idea? And whoever has a sick enough mind to think up injecting people with liquid metal? It's like in the 50's they used to prescribe electro-shock therapy and lobotomy to patients with behaviorall disorders. In fact one of the Kennedy family girls got a lobotomy in like 1940 or so, to correct her unruly behavioral and she lived to be 80 something, of course, brain fucked and retarded. Some lobotomies - and this includes remote x-ray aneurysm creating gamma knife surgeries done on your head while you're sleeping by your neighbours - do nothing as the brain reorganizes, some fuck you up bad, and she was one of the unlucky fucked up bad ones. But that's the punishment the Kennedy family gets on both the male and female line, for their ancestor triggering the great depression, or even if not triggering it, helping it and pushing his own self interest while fucking up the collective. They are trying to somehow put blame on me for the collapse of the housing market. That's bullshit, the houses were already laid to waste by the time I arrived, and I had nothing to do with that decline, but they did force me to participate by seeking my own self interest to make my own ends meet. Or they tried to get me to commute to Detroit, and somehow they could blame me for how that city is bankrupt too. Dude, I renounce all reponsibility to why Detroit is fucked up. I only been to Detroit, or through it, three times in my life.
By the way if people don't stop mowing lawns - or they don't stop mowing every friggin spot, but leaving say the back half of the lot - au naturel - the world economy is going to collapse, to where they are forced to stop mowing lawns. If you're growing food, you're excused to use pesticides, herbicides, and exploit every square inch of a land. But if you're simply mowing a lawn to be "neat and tidy" all the while laying waste to genetic variablity, driving a lot of plant and animal species locally extinct, you are committing a great crime against Life. That's what the tumors in you think. Usually the biggest value of a chemo is not the actual killing of tumoring contraptions in you, but losing your hair, accepting your mortality in the world, and the spiritual transformation. If you are unable to do that, the tumor will kill you.
Cyan.
"So this other guy: he's a cancer treatment like you, right?"
"Not like me. Indium-Gallium, advanced prototype."
"You mean more advanced than you are?"
"Yes. A mimetic poly-alloy."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Liquid metal."
Did you have reduced liver or renal function?
Here's a little tip:
Ketonic diets make excessive use of liver function to produce the ketone bodies that get substituted in cellular metabolism for glucose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
While in normal, healthy people the levels of produced acetone and other biproducts of ketosis are well within the body's ability to safely process and eliminate, renal failure restricts the body's ability to eliminate even normal waste products, such as urea, from the blood. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Engaging in a diet that is known to increase the production rate of these compounds, while suffering from a disorder that either 1) affects the liver's ability to even create these bodies as an energy source to begin with, or 2) affects the body's ability to dispose of the resulting reactive waste compounds, is a no-brainer for being a bad idea.
In the first, you can starve to death while eating lots of fat, and in the second you pickle yourself and can severely damage already chronically affected vital organs. (Acetone, one of the metabolites of ketosis, is known to damage kidney function in high concentrations. Reduced renal function results in higher than normal syrum concentrations of metabolites, which would include the acetone produced during ketosis. Many people with impaired renal function are not aware of it.)
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfa...
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline...
Since you may feel perfectly healthy, and have impaired renal function and not even know it, (especially when one considers the risks associated with being obese in relation to renal disorders-- http://jasn.asnjournals.org/co... -- when coupled with the reason why one would engage in a ketogenic diet to begin with) you could very well be making a hidden but malignant condition worse.
Besides, asking your health care provider before doing *ANYTHING* extreme is simply good medicine.