Four tools are used in the destruction of the cancer cells: gold nanoparticles, laser pulses, X rays and chemotherapy drugs.
In the popular “Deus Ex” video game series, nanotechnology can turn an average government agent into a bionic superman. In fact, nanotech augmentations in the human body aren’t just fun and games. Real-life applications will most likely become reality a lot sooner than you think. In 2007, the world’s first online inventory of nanotech products, Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, found that nearly 500 products, including food, clothing and cosmetics, employed nanotechnology. In this slide show, explore how nanotech can make you stronger, tap into your brain and more. WATCH: NANOTECH REWARDS
Two years ago, researchers at Rice University, led by Dmitri Lapotko, a physicist and biochemist, developed a novel methodfor killing cancer cells. The technique relies on gold nanoparticles infiltrating cancerous cells. When a laser is shone on those cells, tiny bubbles surround them and explode, thereby ripping the cancerous cells apart. If the bursting bubbles don’t completely destroy the cancer cell, the weakened state it’s left in by the explosions makes it more susceptible to chemotherapy drugs.
Now Lapotko and his colleagues are reporting the results of pre-clinical trials using the technique, dubbed “quadrapeutics.” The term stems from the use of four tools in the destruction of the cancer cells: gold nanoparticles, laser pulses, X rays and drugs.
Chemotherapy is actually the first step in the four-pronged attack. In the case of the Rice pre-clinical trials, doxorubicin and paclitaxel were used.
After the drugs are introduced, the protocol works by tagging the gold nanoparticles with antibodies that target specific cancer cells and attach to the cells’ surfaces. The cancer cells begin to ingest the nanoparticles, which are stored just beneath the cells’ protective outer membranes.
The cancer cells are then fired upon with near-infrared laser pulses. The near-infrared light is able to penetrate human tissue but the gold nanoparticles can’t absorb that wavelength of light. Instead, the light excites the free electrons on the gold nanoparticles so that there are collective oscillations that generate excess heat. This material effect is known as plasmonics.
Unlike recent research out of ETH Zurich in Switzerland in which this plasmonic effect with near-infrared light and gold nanoparticles was used to turn up the heat on the cancer cells to kill them, the Rice approach doesn’t depend on heat. Instead, Lapotko’s team focuses on the destruction of cancer cells through intracellular explosions. In this way, only the cancer cells are destroyed and not nearby healthy cells that might otherwise be killed by the heat.
A video describing the method and presenting images of how the cancer cells are blown apart are provided in the video below.
“What kills the most-resistant cancer cells is the intracellular synergy of these components and the events we trigger in cells,” Lapotko said in a press release. “This synergy showed a 100-fold amplification of the therapeutic strength of standard chemoradiation in experiments on cancer cell cultures.”
