Biotech and Nanotech: Novel Cancer Killers

Until recently, physicians have had to rely on "sledge hammer" treatments for fighting cancer: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. All three mainstream approaches to cancer therapy can kill the patient, or have devastating effects on the person's quality of life above and beyond any impact from the cancer. Both doctors and patients would like access to finely targeted therapies that kill only the cancer, and leave the patient whole and healthy. Both biotech and nanotech (as well as the two combined) offer hope for such "magic bullet" therapies.

Specialists at the Curie Institute in Paris have devised a method of "baiting" cancer cells into killing themselves, using special DNA decoys.

North Carolina State University researchers are using modified plant viruses coated with targeting molecules to selectively target and destroy cancer cells.

UC Santa Cruz researchers are coating hollow gold nano-spheres with short-chain targeting molecules that bind to cancer cells. Infrared light beamed onto the tumour is trapped by the gold particles, and the cancer cells are cooked.

Tel Aviv University researchers are building nano-submarines out of phospholipids, filling them with siRNA particles that shut down the target cell's cell division machinery, and coat them with specific targeting molecules.

German researchers are injecting nano-magnetic particles of iron directly into tumours, then using an extermal oscillating magnetic field to induce a killing heat inside the cancer.

You can see how the convergence of nanotech and biotech is aiding researchers in their highly specific targeting of tumour cells, and other cells of interest (over-active immune cells in autoimmune disorders). Some of these treatments require the application of external energy (infrared light, magnetic fields, heat, etc), and other approaches insert the killing impetus inside the nanoparticle itself. Most of the methods use bio-targeting molecules to guide the nanoparticle to the cells of interest.

This is only the beginning. As long as the entire economic infrastructure of the western world is not destroyed by the neofascists currently reigning in Washington, resources will continue to find their way to productive researchers. The pace of discovery may slow, as more resources are diverted to non-productive government programs as well as to politically connected crony-friends of the reich. It is quite possible that even after cleaning out the rat's nest through future elections, recovery from the current spree of corrupt dysfunction may take many years, or decades.