Nanoshells, a potential cancer therapy
WillWare writes "From Ananova, a story about Jennifer West's work at Rice University on "nanoshells", remniscent of earlier work at Sloan-Kettering:"
Tiny golden "bullets" could eventually be used to target and destroy cancerous tumours while leaving healthy tissue unharmed… researchers used nanoshells – tiny particles of silica coated with gold – to apply heat to tumours and destroy them using near-infrared light, a type of low-energy radiation.
WillWare continues:
From Dr. West's website at Rice:
Nanoshells are a new type of nanoparticle with tunable optical properties. For medical applications, these particles can be designed to strongly absorb or scatter light in the near infrared where tissue and blood are relatively transparent. In a cancer therapy application, nanoshells are designed to absorb light and convert the energy to heat for tumor destruction. By conjugating antibodies or peptides to the nanoshell surfaces, binding of nanoshells can be targeted to cancerous cells, and subsequent exposure to near infrared light results in specific and localized destruction of the cancerous cells. A photothermally modulated drug delivery system, optically-controlled valves for microfluidics devices, and a rapid whole blood immunoassay are also under development using nanoshells.
The big advantage of this work over the Sloan-Kettering work is that there is no need for exotic, expensive, time-sensitive materials which can only be produced with a nuclear reactor.
February 17th, 2004 at 10:22 AM
Nanoparticles and Nanoshells?
It looks as if this is related to the work by C. Loo et al. [Nanoshell-enabled photonics-based imaging and therapy of cancer]. Unfortunately they fail to specify the size of the particles or how the "nanoshells" are manufactured. Without that information it is impossible to determine whether or not the use of the "nano-…" terms are correct or are being abused.
I have two problems with this… (1) I'm not about to pay $50.00 for a PDF of the document to get the details from "tcrtonline"; and (2) when the heck will the nano-ice-cream based on nanosphere fat molecules encapsulating nanoscale flavor molecules be available during the treatment of cancer using said nanoshells?
Robert
February 17th, 2004 at 12:58 PM
Re:Nanoparticles and Nanoshells?
It makes you wonder why scientific journals aren't open source yet…if it were free, and everyone had access to the documents, we'd be achieving even faster progress than we are already.
As far as the article is concerned, I think it's just the standard 'nanoscale' technology that really has no significance in the big picture. True Nanotechnology, will be both nanoscale AND rely mostly on quantum mechanics (since it is the only set of rules we have at the moment that can accurately predict the behavior of atoms and molecules at both the nano and pico scale levels) – something which is not being done with the currently hyped 'nanotechnology'.
When we see claimed Nanotechnology that uses something other than electrons to gain power, such as bio-energy, light, or even tachyon energy, then we won't even have to dispute what category it falls under. All of the current 'nanotechnology', however, is just 'nano-scale' – it doesn't matter if the likes of Intel are at the 65 nm scale…it's not Nanotechnology…at least, not in the ways it's envisioned.
July 6th, 2005 at 3:15 AM
i think the naoshells and nanotechnology is extremly laudable. I feel that the nanoshells are one of a kind, and has many juicy information that one could read up on.
i would aprreciate it if you could send a package containing more nanoshells and nanotechnolgoy information into my email inbox, or the website i have given, is not in use anymore.