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Machine That "Uncooks Eggs" Used To Improve Cancer Treatment
hypnosec writes: An Australian invention that gained attention for being able to "unboil" an egg has now been put to use in the treatment of cancer. The device has boosted the potency of a common cancer treatment drug, carboplatino, as much as four-and-a-half-times. ABC.net reports: "Flinders Centre for Innovation in Cancer director Professor Ross McKinnon said it meant a huge advance for cancer treatment. 'It gives us the promise of offering an alternative where we have more drug being delivered to the tumour and less drug being delivered to the rest of the body,' he said. 'That means less side-effects for the patient and hopefully a much better effect in terms of tumour response. What this group are doing is an example of one drug but we would hope we could extend this to many drugs.' The device can process proteins more efficiently than current methods, with possible big ramifications for the pharmaceuticals industry.
There are a lot of medical interventions that are very nice on paper but useless in practice because of the difficulty of delivering something fragile to a specific point in the body. This super-vesicles seem to be still too limited to address this problem perfectly but they seem like a big step forward, a couple of generations later this could very well make gene-therapy, siRNA inhibition, cell-specific drug therapies, etc. practical enough to be used as therapy.