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://phys.org/news/2016-08-legions-nanorobots-cancerous-tumours-precision.html
This article is
about the future.
You can’t ask your
doctor to give you a shot of nanobots to cure breast cancer tomorrow. But your
KIDS might be able to, and almost without a doubt, your grandkids will be able to
take this treatment.
The article talks
about an experiment written up last August in the journal, Nature
Nanotechnology.
Let’s define a few
terms to begin with. Simply, “nano” means “so small you can’t see it without a
microscope”.
Technically, for
those of you so inclined, it means 1/1,000,000,000 (one billionth) of a meter.
For the sake of comparison, a single hair from your head would look fat
compared to a nanometer at a whopping NINETY THOUSAND nanometers wide. This
article talks about the possibility of building “machines” that are about 200
nanometers across. The cancer cell would be a bit over 1000 nanometers (the
same as one micrometer) across.
When I talk about “machines”
here, we’re not talking about lawnmowers. Nanomachines, while they are made by
people, are built out of things that are already around, like bacteria,
viruses, and other microscopic life forms (or more often, “the key is to be
able to both see and manipulate nanomaterials in order to take
advantage of their special properties…the invention of special microscopes gave
scientists the ability to work at the nanoscale. The first of these new
discoveries was the scanning tunneling microscope. While it’s mainly designed
to measure objects, it can also move tiny objects such as carbon nanotubes.”
So doctors and
other technicians are able to “build” very small structures and make them so
that they will do certain things.
The article talks
about doctors who were able to take bacteria, put in a few molecules of
magnetic iron – which gave the machine a built-in compass; and a few molecules
of an oxygen -sensitive material so that it could detect how mch oxygen is in
the cells around it.
Why?
The compass gives
the bacteria – which has long, “sperm-cell-like” tails to move it around – a way
for scientists to aim it to the right area. Once the bacterial nanomachine is
on site, it narrows down the target area by sniffing out the places where
cancer cells have sucked out all the oxygen from the tissue. That’s what
cancers do because growing as fast as they do, they burn a lot of oxygen, just
like we get wheezy when we go on bike rides and have to pedal up a hill.
Why does that
matter? Because the doctors have LOADED THE BACTERIAL NANOMACHINE WITH
TAMOXIFEN OR ADRIMICIN OR ANY OF THE OTHER ANTI-CANCER DRUGS IN OUR ARESENAL.
So? So…instead of
flooding your body with chemo and accidentally killing hair follicles, the only
place in the body that get the chemo is the cancer cells. Which saves the body
all SORTS of abuse.
Hopefully this
excites you as much as it excites me. Now all I have to do is fold my hands and
wait…
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