BREAST CANCER RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! 15 – A REAL Fantastic Cancer Voyage

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/268267.php

“Nanotechnology is all about making things that are less that 100 nanometers [a nanometer is 1/1,000,000,000 (one BILLIONTH) of a meter!] in size.  That is pretty small, we are talking about atomic sized stuff.”

That’s like…STAR TREK stuff, right? “Beam me up, Scotty!” That kind of stuff?

Well now that you mention it, we DO live in the second decade of the 21^st Century. Amazing things are happening. Why not being able to design atom-sized molecules to fight breast cancer!

Why bother – won’t chemo take care of most of the metastatic cells? The answer is “yes, but”. Not nice to hear, but true.

“‘When a patient is diagnosed with cancer, he or she undergoes surgery to remove the primary tumor, then undergoes chemotherapy to kill any residual disease, including distant micro-metastases,’ [Dr.  Efstathios] Karathanasis said...‘Chemotherapy drugs are very potent, but because they are randomly dispersed throughout the body in traditional chemotherapy, they aren't effective with the aggressive forms of cancer,’ he continued. ‘You have to give the patient so much of the drug that it would kill the patient before killing those micro-metastases...But delivering the killer drug only to micro-metastases is a challenge. They are hidden among healthy cells in such small numbers they don't make a blip on today's imaging screens.’”

While this project is ONLY IN THE FIRST STAGES OF ANIMAL TESTING, it holds a huge amount of promise. If the hope that has been placed in this therapy actually pans out, it would mean that lost hair, weakened immune systems, damage to the heart muscle and other debilitating side-effects would vanish and the chemo drugs would not only be more effective, they would also be cheaper.

Perhaps you’ve been reading my “novel-in-progress”, FANTASTIC CANCER VOYAGE. In it, I’ve postulated something that resembles this nanotech attack on cancer.

Based on the article, this is what would happen: nanotechs would create chains of atoms that would be attracted to the surface of cancer cells. Becoming cancerous changes the surface. Cells stop communicating with each other and don’t “know” when to stop growing, so the chains are attracted to these differences. The chains would link to the cancer cell and attached to the chain would be a ball of chemical. Once attached to a cancer cell, the ball would shatter at an electrical signal and deliver the chemical directly to the cancer cell – ONLY killing that cell.

This is further in the future than today – but it’s out there. And it’s coming. And it might just be a treatment for our daughters, our granddaughters…and certainly for our great-granddaughters!

Resources: http://www.nanooze.org/main/Nanooze/Zoom/Zoom.html, http://njms.rutgers.edu/gsbs/olc/molonc/prot/2012/MolOncolCanMemMet2012BW.pdf

Image: http://www.cancerworld.org/cancerworld/images/image/CW55/Nanoparticles%20attack%20cancer%20cells.jpg