History in the making? DNA nanobots to target cancer cells in test patients
Source: youtube.com
Genetically engineered nanobots constructed with strands of DNA will be injected into a critically ill leukemia patient in the hopes of saving that patient’s life. Able to identify and attack cancerous cells while leaving all others unharmed, the new technology may prove to be one of the largest ever medical breakthroughs.
Source: RT
Spotlight on Nanotechnology: Experimental Cancer Treatments
Fighting Cancer with Nanotechnology. Nanoparticles are like a smart weapon that allows doctors to target cancer-fighting drugs to the precise area where they are needed.
Nanoparticles—microscopically small units of technology that can perform complex and intricate tasks—are radically changing the way we fight cancer in modern medicine. If traditional chemotherapy is a shotgun, destroying cancerous tissue but inflicting collateral damage to the rest of the patient’s body, nanoparticles are a smart weapon that allows doctors to target often-toxic cancer-fighting drugs to the precise area where they are needed.
These cancer treatments are administered intravenously and travel through the body until they find and bind with their target—often a tumor. “By using particles as carriers for drugs, the behavior of the drug follows that of the particle to which it is bound,” explains Dr. Michelle Bradbury of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. So, for instance, a particle with peptides on it will stick to a melanoma tumor.
Advantages of Nanoparticle Cancer Treatment
The advantages of nanoparticle cancer treatment are enormous. Targeted delivery avoids damaging otherwise-healthy organs that would be adversely affected by traditional cancer treatment. For example, nanoparticles carrying drugs are so small they can pass right through the liver, thus avoiding the complications that often come from traditional drugs, such as the death of hepatic tissue. Attacking specific tissues without harming adjacent areas allows doctors to use drugs that are more potent and leave them in the body longer.
“Cancers try to evade the immune system and develop ways to eliminate the drugs used to treat them, which can lead to drug resistance,” says Dr. Bradbury. “As higher and higher doses of drugs are given to counteract this resistance, toxicity can occur. By attaching drugs to particles, the cancer cannot eliminate these drugs so readily.”
3 Companies Developing Nanotechnologies to Fight Cancer
Currently, the FDA has approved five nanotechnologies in the fight against cancer, including the treatments developed by the following companies:
1. Celgene, a New Jersey–based biopharmaceutical company that delivers a chemotherapy drug called Taxol. Their nanoparticle treatment binds to albumin, a common protein found in blood, so the medicine is transported through the bloodstream directly to cancerous tumors.
2. Bind Therapeutics, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bind’s nanoparticles, called Accurins, identify a molecule already en route to a cancer-affected part of the body and attach a nanoparticle carrying medicine. When this molecule-nanoparticle duo arrives at a target destination, such as a tumor, the nanoparticle binds with the tumor and localizes treatment.
3. Entrega, a startup in Boston, puts cancer-detecting nanoparticles into pill form. Once in your digestive system, the nanoparticles cross the intestinal wall, enter the bloodstream, and find their way to cancerous tissue.
In all, more than 50 nanotechnologies are in development for cytotoxic drugs, which prevent the rapid growth and division of cancer cells. Since medical nanotechnology is still in the early phases of development, multiple approaches will lead to a range of learning and faster advancement. “There’s no one platform that’s going to achieve everything,” says Dr. Bradbury. The insights gained by doctors and scientists in the years ahead could make nanoparticles the most effective—and most preferred—treatment in the fight against what for many is the most feared disease imaginable.
Source: hp.com
