Photo: MIT

Graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed tiny gold nanoparticles that can hone in on tumors and kill them when heated with laser-directed light.

The rod-shaped gold particles travel through the blood stream and are snared in the small blood vessels in the tumor.  Near-infrared light passes harmlessly through normal tissues but heats the gold rods, and  heat energy destroys tumor cells.

Mice treated with the gold nanorods and laser infrared light had tumors disappear within 15 days and not recur. Read the rest of this entry »

UC San Diego: Glowing Nanoparticles

Safer silicon nanoparticles glow, then degrade into harmless by-products. The tiny, newly designed nanoparticles, a thousand times smaller than the human hair, lodge in cancers too small to see, helping doctors see where tumors are or delivering precise doses of chemotherapy.

Scientists at the University of California in San Diego have a developed a new nanoparticle technique that doesn’t leave toxic metals behind in the body. Because the tiny particles are porous, chemotherapy molecules can be embedded in holes in their structure ten thousand times smaller than a human hair. Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers at the University of California at San Diego targeted tumor blood vessels with chemotherapy carried by microscopic-sized nanoparticles. Although primary tumors were not affected, blood vessels were destroyed, keeping the tumors from spreading throughout the bodies of experimental mice.

The technique allows much lower doses of chemotherapy to be effective, eliminating toxic side effects and avoiding healthy tissue. Read the rest of this entry »