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: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23657
Most of this
article is behind a paywall, but reading the abstract (science term that sort
of means the “summary” of what the paper’s about), I can see the application
possibilities. I’d LOVE to read it in full, but NATURE makes its money selling
the right to read the papers for absurd amounts…
In the online
magazine, Science, an online science news magazine, they translate the abstract
into reasonably understandable English (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/nanomachines-drill-holes-cancer-cells)
Even so, it’s
still pretty heavy stuff, so I’m going to take a stab at it here.
The basic idea is
that by using chemicals, light, and even sound, scientists have created
clusters of atoms that hang together and perform in particular ways. It sounds wild,
but if you think of a all the parts it takes to run your car – or even more
simply, your bicycle – it’s nothing radically different. It’s just the scale
that’s amazing and the tools they use.
By the way, the
things they create – they’re called nanomachines. They first four letters are Latin
and means “one-millionth”. So, these nanomachines (if you ever say Will Smith’s
movie, I, ROBOT, they used “nanites” (another word for namomachines and WAY
easier to say), to destroy the crazy computer VIKI.) can be programmed to do
certain things. Sort of like a set of screwdrivers. I can’t use one of those
weird square-nosed ones to take out a Phillips screw. I can certainly try, but
it strips the head and makes the job of taking out a zillion times more work.
What nanite
scientists do is count on how atoms attach to each other and set them up so
that they can attach together in the right way. In other words, that can set up
a nanite so that it’s attracted to a breast cancer cell – in the nanoworld, a
breast cancer cell will have certain chemicals around it and on its surface.
The nanite looks for the “smell” of the cancer cell and then attaches to it.
They’ve also given
their nanite a sort of “drill bit” on one end – a tail on one end to get
around, a drill bit on the other to dig into a cancer cell. Wrapped inside of
the nanite is a little surprise for the cancer cell – a molecule of chemo drug.
Once it’s drilled through the wall of the cancer cell, it shoves the chemo in,
then shuts down, its weapon delivered.
Zillions of these
little machines seek out and destroy cancer cells, so instead of the chemo
taking out hair cells along with the cancer cells, ONLY the cancer cells get zapped.
That’s the theory,
and now these articles detail how scientists have made it work in the lab. The next
step, of course, will be to see if it works in something alive – usually mice –
and finally seeing if it will work in the complex universe (remember how small
nanites are – 50,000 of them could line of end-to-end and just make it across
the width of a Human HAIR! If you lined up 50,000 people, laying down, feet to
head, that would stretch 52 miles) that would be a Human body.
So, we shall see!
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