Because of the irresistible tendency I have towards making my political opinion known, I haven’t been posting much on science and technology lately. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been anything going on of interest, it just means I have only so many hours in a day, and I cannot write here about what I do at work, which can be really cool.

Here is something that caught my eye this past weekend. From Forbes.com, which gave one of the better explanations of this development:

Anti-Cancer ‘Smart Bomb’ Deals Killer Blow
– Robert Preidt

WEDNESDAY, July 27 (HealthDay News) — Researchers say they’ve developed an anticancer “smart bomb” that delivers a lethal dose of drugs directly to tumors.

This tiny agent, called a “nanocell,” enables precision targeting of the tumor while leaving adjacent healthy tissue unharmed, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

In research with mice, the nanocell proved safe and effective, prolonging survival in animals with melanoma and lung cancer, according to a study in the July 28 issue of Nature.

“We brought together three elements: cancer biology, pharmacology and engineering,” research team leader Ram Sasisekharan, a professor in MIT’s biological engineering division, said in a prepared statement.

The researchers described the nanocell as a balloon within a balloon that resembles an actual cell. The outer membrane of the nanocell is loaded with an anti-angiogenic drug designed to choke off the tumor’s blood supply. The inner membrane of the nanocell is loaded with chemotherapy drugs.

A “stealth” surface chemistry on the nanocell enables it to avoid attracting the attention of the immune system. While the nanocells are small enough (200 nanometers) to pass through tumor blood vessels, they’re too large to pass through the pores of healthy, normal vessels.

Once inside the tumor, the nanocell’s outer membrane disintegrates, releasing the anti-angiogenic drug and causing the collapse of the blood vessels feeding the tumor. The collapsed blood vessels trap the nanocell inside the tumor. The nanocell then slowly releases its cache of chemotherapy drugs.

While interesting in itself because of the technical development (a direct use of nanotechnology, I haven’t had time to finish reading the Nature article yet, I’m very interested in how they fabricate this structure), how it is being reported is also of note.

From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology news office web site:

“We brought together three elements: cancer biology, pharmacology and engineering,” said Ram Sasisekharan, a professor in MIT’s Biological Engineering Division and leader of the research team.

“The fundamental challenges in cancer chemotherapy are its toxicity to healthy cells and drug resistance by cancer cells,” Sasisekharan said. “So cancer researchers were excited about anti-angiogenesis,” the theory that cutting off the blood supply can starve tumors to death. That strategy can backfire, however, because it also starves tumor cells of oxygen, prompting them to create new blood vessels and instigate metastasis and other self-survival activities.

The next obvious solution would be combining chemotherapy and anti-angiogenesis-dropping the bombs while cutting the supply lines. But combination therapy confronted an inherent engineering problem. “You can’t deliver chemotherapy to tumors if you have destroyed the vessels that take it there,” Sasisekharan said. Also, the two drugs behave differently and are delivered on different schedules: anti-angiogenics over a prolonged period and chemotherapy in cycles.

“We designed the nanocell keeping these practical problems in mind,” he said. Using ready-made drugs and materials, “we created a balloon within a balloon, resembling an actual cell,” explains Shiladitya Sengupta, a postdoctoral associate in Sasisekharan’s laboratory.

In addition to Sasisekharan and Sengupta, the co-authors are David Eavarone, Ishan Capila and Ganlin Zhao of MIT’s Biological Engineering Division; Nicki Watson of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research; and Tanyel Kiziltepe of MIT’s Department of Chemistry.

Note the use of a military metaphor, “dropping the bombs while cutting the supply lines,” beyond the simple “smart bomb” analogy from the headline used by Forbes.com.

From the Yahoo! India News article on this topic, the headline is telling: Indian scientist designs nanocell to kill cancer

Technically, it should read “Indian scientist leads team that designs nanocell to kill cancer”.

All reporting on the same technology development, all with different slants.

Illustrative of more than the nanocell itself, no?

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