Tackling cancer with nanotechnology

A major downside to current chemotherapies for cancer treatment are their side effects. Since the drugs are not capable of distinguishing between healthy cells and those ravaged by cancer, they are basically toxic for the entire body. The result is that cancer patients may suffer pain, digestive distress, hair loss, fatigue and a host of other un-pleasantries while combating their cancer. That's why researchers have long dreamed of customized drugs that only act on cancer cells and leave the healthy ones alone.

Perhaps the best hope for this comes from the miniscule science of nanotechnology, which attempts to sculpt practical applications out of profoundly small particles. A joint research team from UCLA and Yonsei University in Korea has made impressive strides towards a future of targeted drug delivery. By magnetizing nanoparticles loaded with the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin, they were able to introduce the drug into a field of cancer cells before administering a cancer-killing dose. By turning on an electromagnetic field that stimulated the drug-laden nanoparticles, they were able to release the chemotherapy agent by essentially shaking open valves on the particles. The potential promise this holds is to deliver drugs only to areas stricken by cancer instead of taking the systemic approach that affects the entire body. This research was recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

There are many unknowns, including the unknown effects of nanoparticles themselves on human health. A separate set of researchers at North Carolina State University are helping expand our understanding of nanoparticle safety, as well as their potential for targeted drug delivery. They've found that the characteristics of the particles' surface, and their shape effects their behavior, and by extension their potential health effects or ability to deliver drugs. They've developed a chemical method for establishing nano-finger prints of the particles that allow them to predict how the substances will behave in the body. Their research has just been published online in Nature Nanotechnology.

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