Radiowave+nanoparticles=cure for cancer?

[NB-SK]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/10/60minutes/main4006951.shtml?source=RSSattr=Health_4006951

[suttree]

simply amazing eh? i hope it is what they're saying it might be.

[NB-SK]

It's not much different than zapping tumors with a laser, both methods produce localized heat that destroys the cells. What's exciting about this is that once we have the technology to attach antibodies to nanoparticles, it will be able to 'zap' the metastasized cells. A patients body could potentially be 100% cancer free after a few treatments, or maybe even just one. Scientists can already create a variety of nanoparticle hybrids, like dye nanoparticles and nanoparticle polymers, so I would bet that we'll soon have the technology to attach nanoparticles to antibodies.

[Accept2]

If it works, there will be a study to refute its claims, and then it will disappear. No one ****s with the AMA's way of doing things.........

[NB-SK]

If it works, there will be a study to refute its claims, and then it will disappear. No one ****s with the AMA's way of doing things.........

Nah, the science is good.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2008/04/kanzius_therapy


PS. In the US, drugs and treatments are approved by the USFDA, not the AMA.

[Starbuck]

The science is very good. 60 Minutes did a great bit on it last week.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/10/60minutes/main4006951.shtml

[devnulljp]

I'd be surprised if there ever was a "cure for cancer" simply because "cancer" is such a nebulous term and encompasses such a huge range of conditions. There really is no such thing as "cancer" just lots of things that result in dysregulation of cell growth.
Still, looks like an interesting new method to go after some cases of some cancers.
Oh, and that thing about the AMA being a cabal of conspirators...come on.

[Accept2]

Oh, and that thing about the AMA being a cabal of conspirators...come on.

Right, the AMA are pure angels. Im surprised they dont hang out at the docks with baseball bats to beat the shit out of any immigrants who think they can work in North America as doctors........
http://www.naturalnews.com/021949.html

[devnulljp]

Right, the AMA are pure angels. Im surprised they dont hang out at the docks with baseball bats to beat the shit out of any immigrants who think they can work in North America as doctors........
http://www.naturalnews.com/021949.html
Now, I didn't say that either. Shades of grey? (baseball bats WTF??)
Oh, and is that supposed to be a credible news source? I live on Salt Spring, I'm surrounded by earthy crunchies, contrails, vaccination deniers, laetrile hustlers, feng shui, rub a piece of garlic on it and it'll get better; cognitive dissonance is a easy thing to spot.
It must be true, there have been no medical advances whatsoever in the last 50 years. None. All quashed at birth by the evil establishment </Ben Stein Voice off>
Now, if you'd said Australia... ;-)

[Accept2]

Now, I didn't say that either. Shades of grey? (baseball bats WTF??)
Oh, and is that supposed to be a credible news source?

New York Times good enough?.........
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E4D7153AF93AA15756C0A9619582 60

[devnulljp]

New York Times good enough?.........
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E4D7153AF93AA15756C0A9619582 60
So, doesn't that make you glad you live in Canada :smilie_flagge17:

[Accept2]

Our doctors arent angels either. They keep immigrant doctors from working forcing wait times to increase.........

[devnulljp]

Our doctors arent angels either. They keep immigrant doctors from working forcing wait times to increase.........
Didn't say they were angels. Just don't believe in a cabal made up of the medial establishment tying to prevent people from rubbing garlic on their smallpox sores to cure them. I've worked in and around the medical field for 20+ years. I think you'll find that most unions of any kind engage in the kind of practices you mention, the only difference is that no-one else really cares who pours the steel/writes the software/drives the bus/resurfaces the road...
There's a lot of wonky political alliances these days it seems, especially in the US (I would think the entire medical system in the US would be in violation of the Hippocratic oath for example...). Glad to be in Canada.

[devnulljp]

Is Clint Hammond back?
You mean me? That's not very polite now is it? Harsh.

[Mooh]

I really hope there's a breakthrough with this or some other cure soon. I've lost too many friends and family to cancer, like my sister, aunt, and a fishing buddy, among others. The sooner the better for any form of treatment or cure, as far as I'm concerned.

Peace, Mooh.

[devnulljp]

I think our main real hope is when sequencing technology becomes cheap and fast enough to be able to quickly russle up a genetic type for individual patients and the npull out various forms of individualised treatments -- there's quite a lot of research going in that direction but it's still early days, and it's still expensive and too hit and miss. Not all cancers react the same (or at all) to not all therapies; the trick is going to be figuring out which ones do react to which treatments in which individual genetic backgrounds.
If this stuff pans out and offers yet another tool for clobbering cancer cells, it'll get us one step closer, and that's got to be a good thing.

[NB-SK]

I'd be surprised if there ever was a "cure for cancer" simply because "cancer" is such a nebulous term and encompasses such a huge range of conditions. There really is no such thing as "cancer" just lots of things that result in dysregulation of cell growth.
Still, looks like an interesting new method to go after some cases of some cancers.
Oh, and that thing about the AMA being a cabal of conspirators...come on.

Well, not really. All cancers have one thing in common: they are caused by cells that show abnormal growth and/or proliferation (neoplasia). Sure, there are different types of cancerous cells and not all cancers form tumors (such as leukemia), but, that is not of great concern with this technology.

Each type of cancerous cell has its own distinct cell membrane and, therefore, its own specific receptors that will allow an antibody-nanoparticle hybrid to enter the cells. Many of these receptors have already been identified. All we need to do is produce antibody-nanoparticle hybrids that target a specific type of receptor, on that is only found on a particular type of cancerous cell.

Since all cells must be supplied with oxygen to survive, they all come into contact with blood...See how the technology is brilliant?

[devnulljp]

Well, not really. All cancers have one thing in common: they are caused by cells that show abnormal growth and/or proliferation (neoplasia).
...that may be mediated by a myriad of different pathways.
Each type of cancerous cell has its own distinct cell membrane...All we need to do is produce antibody-nanoparticle hybrids that target a specific type of receptor, on that is only found on a particular type of cancerous cell.
That's a pretty big "all we need to do" ;-)
There was a lot of hype and hope for this kind of approach 20 years ago, with the hope of discovering the cancer antigen(s). Only back then the big talk was focused on mAbs or some other form of artificial ligand -- in principle, this looks similar except using nanotech to produce the ligands? It's a pretty elegant idea, and I hope it works. Not holding my breath for a cure for cancer, but it might make a (hopefully big) dent.

[NB-SK]

I think our main real hope is when sequencing technology becomes cheap and fast enough to be able to quickly russle up a genetic type for individual patients and the npull out various forms of individualised treatments -- there's quite a lot of research going in that direction but it's still early days, and it's still expensive and too hit and miss. Not all cancers react the same (or at all) to not all therapies; the trick is going to be figuring out which ones do react to which treatments in which individual genetic backgrounds.
If this stuff pans out and offers yet another tool for clobbering cancer cells, it'll get us one step closer, and that's got to be a good thing.

Sure, using genetic sequencing to treat cancer is exciting technology to me, but our main hope? You make it seem as if you think that this won't work.

Trust me when I say that all cells die if when their structures are evaporated or 'caramelized' by extreme heat, regardless of their mitochondrial or nuclear DNA. That's why lasers are used to treat certain types of cancers.

[NB-SK]

...that may be mediated by a myriad of different pathways.

That's a pretty big "all we need to do" ;-)
There was a lot of hype and hope for this kind of approach 20 years ago, with the hope of discovering the cancer antigen(s). Only back then the big talk was focused on mAbs or some other form of artificial ligand -- in principle, this looks similar except using nanotech to produce the ligands? It's a pretty elegant idea, and I hope it works. Not holding my breath for a cure for cancer, but it might make a (hopefully big) dent.

The pathway is irrelevant in this treatment. It doesn't seek to prevent neoplasia as does genetic therapy, it simply destroys the cells without the associated sideeffects of existing treatments that follow the same approach.

It's not that big of a jump, actually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanomedicine#Cancer

[devnulljp]

The more things we have to bash the little buggers with the better.
hey, if this system can identify cells based on surface expression of antigens, wonder if it can be used to kill virus-infected cells blebbing out progeny virions...cool.

Also, not really talking about genetic therapy, as genetic typing to allow tailor-made individual medicine. So, you find this technique works in 45% of cases of a certain type of tumour in people with a certain genetic background wrt a batch of different markers -- this will become reality with the way microarrays are developing. First time I ran a microarray experiment, it used a grid of 8x8 Pasteur pipettes that had been pulled by hand over a Bunsen flame to a point, and the gridder was a huge brass thing made in the machine shop. Fast forward a few years, and I've recently been building and annotating databases for 16k+ arrays, and those are small by current standards. There are new sequencing machines that can do a Gig of data per run. They're expensive, but so were PCR machines when they first came out (yes, I've done PCR with water baths or heating blocks and a stopwatch). Point is, before too long, hopefully, should you develop a nasty illness like this, a quick paired biopsy of the lesion and some healthy tissue, type both, find out what will and what won't work, and then go to town with therapy. Burn the sucker out, hit it with hormones, block its cell division, target it with retroviruses, use harsh language and insult its feelings, whatever has the greatest likelihood of working in any given case. I read a fascinating article years ago about a cancer researcher at John Hopkins I think who was diagnosed with some particularly nasty form of cancer. He went upstairs to his lab and started work on himself to do just that. Wish I could remember his name.
Mind you, the cabal will most likely stop this Utopia from happening by beating up all the immigrant doctors with baseball bats...or something.
;-)

[devnulljp]

No, I thought that Accept2's posts were very Hammond-esque
Ah, colour me touchy. Sorry.
it's been a day for communication snafus around here...

[NB-SK]

The more things we have to bash the little buggers with the better.
hey, if this system can identify cells based on surface expression of antigens, wonder if it can be used to kill virus-infected cells blebbing out progeny virions...cool.

Also, not really talking about genetic therapy, as genetic typing to allow tailor-made individual medicine. So, you find this technique works in 45% of cases of a certain type of tumour in people with a certain genetic background wrt a batch of different markers -- this will become reality with the way microarrays are developing. First time I ran a microarray experiment, it used a grid of 8x8 Pasteur pipettes that had been pulled by hand over a Bunsen flame to a point, and the gridder was a huge brass thing made in the machine shop. Fast forward a few years, and I've recently been building and annotating databases for 16k+ arrays, and those are small by current standards. There are new sequencing machines that can do a Gig of data per run. They're expensive, but so were PCR machines when they first came out (yes, I've done PCR with water baths or heating blocks and a stopwatch). Point is, before too long, hopefully, should you develop a nasty illness like this, a quick paired biopsy of the lesion and some healthy tissue, type both, find out what will and what won't work, and then go to town with therapy. Burn the sucker out, hit it with hormones, block its cell division, target it with retroviruses, use harsh language and insult its feelings, whatever has the greatest likelihood of working in any given case. I read a fascinating article years ago about a cancer researcher at John Hopkins I think who was diagnosed with some particularly nasty form of cancer. He went upstairs to his lab and started work on himself to do just that. Wish I could remember his name.
Mind you, the cabal will most likely stop this Utopia from happening by beating up all the immigrant doctors with baseball bats...or something.
;-)

Yes, I know. It's fascinating stuff.

We still did the ELISA tests, RIA, and whatnot by hand (I would imagine most of these tests are automated and computerized now) last time I was in a lab.

[devnulljp]

Yes, I know. It's fascinating stuff.
We still did the ELISA tests, RIA, and whatnot by hand (I would imagine most of these tests are automated and computerized now) last time I was in a lab.
Funny thing, I saw at least one PCR robot at the Sanger Centre that's basically back to the good old ways -- essentially big tubs of water at the right temperatures and a robot that hauls these huge refrigerator-size racks of plates from one to the other really quickly...they said it gives better results, faster, than a room full of programmed heating blocks. There is a trade-off though; it becomes a lot easier to lose touch with what you're actually doing when so much of it is automated, and of course it's easy to get buried in data. Richard Feynman talked about the differences in the colliders (I think) between Princeton and MIT -- at one (P I think), the thing was state of the art and built for the physicists, at MIT they built it themselves and it was all crocodile clips and gaffa tape, but they got better results because they had such an organic understanding of how it worked.
Still, huge amounts of data is definitely the way of the future -- I sat in on a talk by Amos Bairoch a year or two ago where he talked about building Swiss-Prot. Cool.

Sorry, veering off-topic. it's good to see some real-world potential in nano tech after all the buzzword hype over the years.

[Wild Bill]

Funny thing, I saw at least one PCR robot at the Sanger Centre that's basically back to the good old ways -- essentially big tubs of water at the right temperatures and a robot that hauls these huge refrigerator-size racks of plates from one to the other really quickly...they said it gives better results, faster, than a room full of programmed heating blocks. There is a trade-off though; it becomes a lot easier to lose touch with what you're actually doing when so much of it is automated, and of course it's easy to get buried in data. Richard Feynman talked about the differences in the colliders (I think) between Princeton and MIT -- at one (P I think), the thing was state of the art and built for the physicists, at MIT they built it themselves and it was all crocodile clips and gaffa tape, but they got better results because they had such an organic understanding of how it worked.
Still, huge amounts of data is definitely the way of the future -- I sat in on a talk by Amos Bairoch a year or two ago where he talked about building Swiss-Prot. Cool.

Sorry, veering off-topic. it's good to see some real-world potential in nano tech after all the buzzword hype over the years.

Looks like I've found another admirer of Dr. Kary Mullis!:smile:

:food-smiley-004:

[NB-SK]

Looks like I've found another admirer of Dr. Kary Mullis!:smile:

:food-smiley-004:

You have no idea.

I flipped when one of my coworkers told me that he knows Dr. Craig Venter.

[devnulljp]

I flipped when one of my coworkers told me that he knows Dr. Craig Venter.
I've worked with a lot of people that know/have met/have fought with him. He's kinda the antichrist in academic biology circles (at least the ones I've moved in). He's the "guy who wanted to own the genome". I've always been more in the John Sulston camp.

[NB-SK]

I've worked with a lot of people that know/have met/have fought with him. He's kinda the antichrist in academic biology circles (at least the ones I've moved in). He's the "guy who wanted to own the genome". I've always been more in the John Sulston camp.

Well, it's ironic that you use the term 'antichrist' to describe him. I used to be in the other camp, but I've since heard stories about the politics that went on behind the scenes and how he stood up to it (and by politics I mean interference from US government officials who would have loved to see the genome project killed --or at least stalled and its discoveries under their control-- because of their religious convictions).