Nanotechnology to Take On cancer
This is pretty cool:
In the fight against cancer, some scientists are thinking small. Really, really small.
The National Cancer Institute launches a five-year, $144 million project today to investigate using nanotechnology, the science of building devices on the atomic level, to fight cancer.
The treatments that will be looked at include, among other approaches, the use of gold nanoshells that "cook" tumor cells to death and nanoparticles that deliver chemotherapy on a cell-by-cell basis. We've been tracking these developments over the past year (here and here, for example). It's gratifying to see these lines of research get additional funding. Moreover, with the blessing of the National Cancer Institute, it would seem that nanomedicine is well on its way to being mainstream.
(via Kurzweil AI)
Comments
The gold nanoshells development sounds particularly promising.
The hope is that this sort of directed radiation therapy would not sicken the patient the way current therapies do now, while being more effective. The amount of radiation involved would be a fraction of what is used now.
The exciting part is that this isn't spooky nanotech that is decades away. This could be used in practice within a couple of years.
Posted by: Stephen Gordon![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.blog.speculist.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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September 13, 2004 09:23 AM