Nanomedicine Kills Brain Cancer Cells 99
destinyland writes "Scientists from the University of Chicago and the US Department of Energy have developed the first nanoparticles that seek out and destroy GMB brain cancer cells. Nanoparticles killed up to 80% of the brain cancer cells after just five minutes of exposure to white light, showing the promise of nanomedicine — highly-specific intervention at the molecular scale. Because nanomedicine could repair brain cells or damaged nerve and muscle tissue, the NIH has established eight Nanomedicine Development Centers around the country for their Nanomedicine Roadmap Initiative. Researchers have also used gold nanospheres to search out and 'cook' skin cancer cells with light — 'It's basically like putting a cancer cell in hot water and boiling it to death,' says one researcher. And the NIH Roadmap ultimately predicts 'novel tiny sensors ... that search for, and destroy, infectious agents.'"
Exploit (Score:3, Insightful)
Great! Now The government can simply kill off the specific brain cells they find responsible for independent thought!
Re:Exploit (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother with using advanced technology like this when the school system already does that? :)
Don't expect too much from this treatment (Score:3, Insightful)
The article states that "cultured human GMB cells" were "killed up to 80 percent... after 5 minutes of exposure to focused white light".
How exactly are you going to expose a malignant tumor that has diffusely infiltrated the parenchyma of the brain to focused white light? You can't surgically resect a GBM unless you are willing to remove an entire cerebral hemisphere. If you scooped out part of it and exposed the remaining cavity to white light you would barely effect any of the remaining tumor.
Now if brain tumors only occurred in petri dishes then this treatment would result in a brief remission.
Just great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wish they had things like this when my wife was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme four years ago. One afternoon, six weeks after diagnosis, she said she was sleepy. We said "I love you" and shared a kiss before she fell asleep. Later that afternoon, swelling around the tumor herniated her brain stem. She never woke up and died in my arms one week later. Twenty years together. I miss her every day and I don't think I'll ever recover.
Love the people in your life like there's no tomorrow. (We were lucky.)
P.S. For you Googlers, the more common abbreviation is GBM [wikipedia.org].
Re:Don't expect too much from this treatment (Score:4, Insightful)
Any number of possible solutions. Nanolasers; fiber optics; or they could use x-ray absorbing particles under the surface of the skull which can penetrate soft tissue.
The research as stated in the article isn't exactly meant to be implemented as is for surgical procedures. It has to be engineered in some way that can be used in actual surgical/therapeutic environments. The REAL STORY is that it's possible using a very simple and effective technique. No one said that it was going to be implemented exactly this way.
So I actually believe al contrare that there is much to be expected from this treatment.
Re:Exploit (Score:3, Insightful)
you can't know ahead of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully, you can come to understand this before you need others to understand this of you.
Term abuse and real nanomedicine (Score:3, Insightful)
The individual who submitted this item and the /. editor who approved it should be accused (and presumably flogged) for spreading buzzworditis. We have had "nanomedicine" using the definition of "medical intervention at the molecular scale for curing disease or repairing damaged tissues" (using sub-100 nm particles) since the discovery of penicillin 80+ years ago (and even earlier if you count some less well known drugs). The only thing offered by most current "claims" of nanomedicine involve more focused targeting, usually using antibodies combined with some focused radiation (heat, light, etc.) and is only the result of the fact that we have a somewhat greater knowledge of which proteins may be more highly expressed by cancer cells combined with somewhat less toxic radiation therapies (IR or visible light vs. X-rays). There isn't anything "new" here. This is simply a refinement of what we have been doing for 30 or more years. If you wanted to call this "nanomedicine" then you should also call the use of the chemotherapeutic drug "Gleevec" (which is now 8 years old) "nanomedicine".
I was at the conference in the early part of this decade when NIH announced to great fanfare that it was launching a program involving "nanotechnology" and "nanomedicine". It was clear at the time that they didn't know what they were doing (and I stood up in the NIH auditorium and told them so -- and pointed out that they would have to read Drexler & Freitas before they would reach that point). They have gotten somewhat better but by and large they are still doing more of the same (which is a well known problem with the standard medical grant approval research process -- one gets approved by making small incremental improvements, not by really innovating). As a result what goes by the name of "nanomedicine" is really nothing more than fancy chemotherapy.
It should be noted that we came much closer to real nanomedicine in the 1990's when there was a lot of activity with gene therapy research. Unfortunately due to a few deaths and the FDA squashing such efforts, gene therapy research is largely at a standstill. The work by Sangamo and others is making slow progress but it could have been much further along by now (we could have had virus based "limited intelligence" therapies that would sense what cells are cancerous and caused them to commit suicide).
Cancer and aging are both very simple. In terms /.'ers will appreciate, "the code becomes corrupted". Cancer is a subset of aging in that a specific subset of the genome (involving those genes regulating cell replication and migration) become corrupted. To fix these problems you have to eliminate the bad code and replace it with good code. In theory what chemotherapy and radiation therapy attempt to do is eliminate the bad code (but grossly -- think using an atom bomb when one would like to use a precision implosion to bring down a Las Vegas hotel). Replacing the cells with good code is what stem cell therapies (if one could use pristine stem cells -- those with unmutated/unaged genomes) would do. Even better would be using bacteria sized nanorobots to scan the code and fix the errors. That is what Robert Freitas has envisioned "chromallocyte" nanorobots doing. But their implementation is so far from the limited NIH vision of "nanomedicine" (think going to the moon vs. launching a bottle rocket in ones back yard) that it is a gross abuse of the term "nanomedicine" when used to describe enhanced chemotherapy.
Now, for those few who are nanoliterate among the readers... Drexler described a nanoassembler in 1992 (in Nanosystems). Freitas mentioned chromallocytes (and what they could do) in 1999 (in Nanomedicine V I and in more detail in a subsequent technical paper). Drexler and Merkle designed ~5000 atoms of a 4-8 million atom nanoassembler in the 1993 time frame (it took several person-months). We now have supercomputers capable of molecular simulations of nanoassemblers (the ribosome was simulated at Los Alamos in ~2003). After the design and simulate stages one has the build, assemble and test stages. No different from what we have been doing with cars and planes for decades. But we will not get there by seeing if we can build better bottle rockets.