Last week, MIT’s Technology Review published a piece on the development of new, nanotechnology-based drug delivery techniques for the treatment of cancer. Specifically, the studies focused on pancreatic cancer, which kills about 35,000 people every year.
These “nanotechnology-based drug delivery techniques” constitute a major breakthrough in the War on Cancer which, since it was first declared in 1971, could use a boost (*If you’re interested, a quick review of the biological mechanisms in cancer can be found at the end of this post).
Currently, cancer therapy includes surgery to remove affected tissue, and chemotherapy and/or radiation to kill cancer cells. The problem with chemotherapy and radiation is that it exposes all cells to their toxic load. An analogy: It’s kind of like having a poisonous snake problem in a certain section of the woods behind your house. Radiation, in this example, would be much like burning down that section of woods to combat said snakes. The Result: You get rid of a lot of snakes, but you also kill many natural, non-obtrusive, animals.
Now, imagine that you have a special beetle (just go with me) that can infiltrate the snake’s defenses and infect them with an anti-drug, nullifying their poisonous bite. Not only would you be taking care of your snake problem, but you’d be doing so with minimal impact on the other species present.
This is kind of how nanotechnology works. In a nutshell, the drugs are contained in tiny, engineered particles which, when injected, fight the cancerous cells from the inside. Since nanotechnology works at an atomic level, teeny-tiny agents of destruction can be customized for the particularities of a type of cancer. This is what they accomplished in the research labs at Massachusetts General Hospital where they’ve designed two new types of agents to treat human pancreatic cells.
Each cell fights the cancerous pancreatic tumor in a unique way.
Such advances in biotechnology (at the nano scale) open doors to all kind possibilities, from curing cancer to manufacturing new tissue. The latter has the potential to repair damaged tissue, such as exists in Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, or spinal cord injuries, among other things.
Strides toward such a future are already being made: In early 2008, researchers at the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair, created a functioning heart from a dead rat heart and new cells from baby rats. Sure, humans aren’t going to benefit much from an engineered rat heart – pig, maybe – but the point is that it’s possible. And what’s possible on a small scale, usually, can be adapted to work on a larger scale.
Like the researchers in the video below say, there’s no reason to stop at hearts – why not any organ?
*Every cell in our body has the same strands of DNA, the complete blueprint for every type of cell in the body. Nearly all of the sequence will be covered except for the genes related to its particular function (i.e. nerve function, if it’s a nerve cell, or gut function if it’s a gut cell).
The unexpressed part of the DNA is blocked by “repressor proteins” that help coordinate the on/off switch to accelerate or slow cell division at different stages of development. If the protein fails, it can uncover the growth gene and kick the cell back in to a rapid multiplication state again, which is what cancer is. “Carcinogens” are named as such because they have the capacity to break down repressor proteins (among other things), a process that also happens as a normal part of aging. - CS
