Machine That "Uncooks Eggs" Used To Improve Cancer Treatment 39
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.
arrow of time (Score:3)
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Really? Another take on Jane Eyre? I'm sorry but I asked for a terminating pass from my English professor in Romantic Literature as I had an instinctual 'flight or fight' response after reading the genre.
That doesn't mean that The Eyre Affair won't be on my reading list though but I already have slight nausea thinking about it.
OTOH I'm thinking of writing a Sci-Fi time travel specific to 17th century Turkey and the Ottoman attempts to conquer Vienna. No eggs though, scrambled or otherwise. Maybe I can put a
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Yes, but will it un-blend?
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That's a Paul McCartney song.
Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Wonder if "untangling" proteins could help with Alzheimers and "Mad Cow?.
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It's an exciting time to be alive; with quality of life extension, space exploration, and artificial intelligence on the very real scientific horizon.
If only we can resolve our speciescidal tendencies.
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Sure seems likely. Cataracts and even aging cells, too, one day.
It's an exciting time to be alive; with quality of life extension, space exploration, and artificial intelligence on the very real scientific horizon.
If only we can resolve our speciescidal tendencies.
"speciescidal" - unfortunately, that's a word made up out of thin air.
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"speciescidal" - unfortunately, that's a word made up out of thin air.
As all words are.
Mind blown!
speciescide is well within google search parameter (Score:2)
But. My only use of poetic license has been with tense, not an attempt at neologism.
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There is nothing wrong with Cromulency if used correctly.
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There is nothing wrong with Cromulency if used correctly.
No there's'nt any problem I see with re-tensing and such, only with the misplaced capital letter on "Cromulency".
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> there's'nt
Your second apostrophe should be between the "n" and the "t".
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
The process involves liquefying the protein-containing material and running it through a fluid vortex that applies strong shear forces to the individual molecules, untangling them and allowing them to refold. This process is likely to be somewhat more detrimental to brain function than the mis-folded proteins were.
In this case, it appears the same shear forces cause the cancer drug to be more likely to get encapsulated in a lipid vesicle, which protects the drug and helps get it past cell membranes. Useful, but not directly applicable to Alzheimer's or prion diseases.
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liquefying the protein-containing material and running it through a fluid vortex
LOL, OK that answers that.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Wonder if "untangling" proteins could help with Alzheimers and "Mad Cow?.
There are two main theories about Alzheimers. The dominant theory is that it's caused by beta-amyloid protein which forms plaques. The minority theory is that it's caused by tau protein which forms long filaments called "tangles"; these tangles gum up the neuron and eventually cause it to burst. http://taurx.com/tau-tangles-i... [taurx.com]
My father during his PhD discovered that a common dye, methylene blue, causes those filaments to untangle. He formed a small pharmaceutical company to pursue this idea. They tweaked the chemical a bit, including with heavy duty computer number-crunching to simulate its 3d structure and mode of interaction. They had great results in Phase 2 trials, and their Phase 3 trials are currently underway. Fingers crossed.
That said, Alzheimers disease is a graveyard of pharmaceutical funding. $18+ billion dollars put into drug trials so far (not just "foundational research"), primarily on the beta-amyloid hypothesis, but with nothing yet to show.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-04-30/do-we-all-have-alzhemers-completely-wrong-man-says-yes/ [pri.org]
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A few choice quotes from this research:
MB...initiated widespread neuronal apoptosis....rapid suppression of evoked excitatory field potentials by MB...dose-dependent effect of this drug on cell death....exposure to MB at non-cell-death-inducing concentrations could still induce significant retraction of dendritic arbor
And what's the researchers' conclusion?
MB exerts neurotoxic effects on the central nervous system
Thanks, but no thanks. Parent poster, go peddle your pharmascam elsewhere.
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Sure. Except that extracting them and tossing them in a fluidic vortex to untangle them will kill you.
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Yep that was pointed out.
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about a year ago this was posted on /.
Are you sure? I remember that in January I saw that news about an egg's white "unboiling" machine that was interesting at most but didn't seem to have any useful purpose at the time. Are you saying that this machine was used for cancer prior been used to "un"make breakfast?
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Gentleman (and I use the term loosely) - the information you seek is in the fucking summary.
Solving the delivery bottleneck (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
You want to unboil/unscramble an egg? (Score:2)
Feed it to a chicken.
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Feed it to a chicken.
Better yet: Feed it to a roasted chicken!
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They also blocked his father's condom, his mother's birth control and her abortion :(
Lipid formulations of cancer drugs exist (Score:4, Informative)
Lipid formulations of cancer drugs already exist, notably liposomal doxorubicin. Usually these result in better intracellular delivery and less toxicity. The problem is that making stable lipid formulations is quite hard and the resulting product quite expensive. If this, apparently simple, method can create liposomal carboplatin (or whatever other drug), it could allow cheaper and more diverse liposomal anti-cancer drugs. That would be nice. Especially carboplatiin (and cisplatin) are extremely important for many, many different chemotherapy protocols.