| From: donpat | 7/27/2005 1:52:08 PM | | | | | | Nanotech Moves Closer to Cure
When Dr. James Baker returned from the first Gulf War in 1991, his University of Michigan colleagues must have assumed the medical researcher's head had sustained a direct Scud missile hit. The good doctor came home with some pretty wacky ideas.
Instead of using live viruses to destroy diseased cells, why not send in man-made, nanoscale molecules with tiny tendrils that scientists could engineer to battle specific types of cancers?
Remember, this was the early '90s. Few had even heard of the internet, much less "nanotechnology," which was then firmly the domain of futurists, and certainly not on the radar of respectable beaker slingers.
"In fact, there was a lot of derision at NIH (National Institutes of Health) that this was not real science," Baker recalls. "But as it became clear that gene therapy was not going anywhere without different approaches, I think the reality of, the necessity of, bioengineering in this process became clear."
Today, the National Cancer Institute is on its way to becoming a Nano Cancer Institute as it prepares to spend $144.3 million over five years on the engineered nanoparticles "approach" that Baker and just a few others had championed more than a decade ago. As for Baker, he's doing rather well in his corner office at the Center for Biologic Nanotechnology with a panoramic view of downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Baker had been involved in the Army's first attempts at DNA delivery of the adeno vaccine to combat acute respiratory illness among the troops. He found that not only was the body's immune system fighting off the viral-based vaccine, but the entire works were coming to "hard stops" at 150 nanometers. Things just did not get into cells very effectively beyond that.
It seemed clear to Baker that engineered nanoparticles would have to become part of the solution if they wanted to really chase after the bad guys in the body. "If we now want to fix the dysfunction of cells that lead to most of the diseases that we're currently fighting, we have to engineer at the same scale as the cells," Baker says.
That's the problem that was swirling around in Baker's head after the Gulf War. He wasn't the only scientist working on it, but he did have one advantage. He's located just 100 miles south of a nanotech pioneer: former Dow chemist Donald Tomalia, who had invented a type of particle called dendrimers. Tomalia realized -- unfortunately about two decades before the rest of the world -- that his man-made, tendriled molecule could be used in targeted drug delivery.
Tomalia saw that Baker was one of the few scientists at the time who also saw the possibilities within these sticky little nanothings. "He was a medical guy who could understand this," Tomalia says. "I think he very quickly began to realize the important implications that dendrimers would have."
All through the mid- and late '90s, Baker and Tomalia quietly experimented with these particles. A synthetic chemist and a medical researcher made for an odd couple at the time.
Lack of cooperation and understanding between the scientific disciplines is one of the toughest challenges facing nanotech researchers. Cooperation may sound simple to those outside the academic world, but cross-disciplinary collaboration is not the way universities have traditionally been organized.
That's the thinking behind the University of Michigan's new Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and the Biological Sciences, which Baker will head. "I think any university that doesn't develop collaborative centers like this is going to be frozen out," he says.
The convergence of the sciences at Michigan has led to dramatic success of late. Baker's lab recently received a $6.3 million Gates Foundation grant to develop hepatitis B vaccines that can be delivered through the nose, rather than by needle. They will be able to survive outside a refrigerator, making them easier to use in developing nations. And a breakthrough announced in late June heralded a new kind of cancer therapy that acts as a kind of "Trojan horse," infiltrating cancer-cell receptors then turning the cancer against itself.
"I think one of the things that's really important is we actually can, for the first time, show that something injected not only gets into the cancer tumor, but actually gets into the cancer cells themselves," Baker says. "This is very important for both diagnosis and therapy."
The next challenge is getting any of this through the FDA, which is at once under pressure to speed up new drug approvals for an aging population, and to slow down the process in light of recent scandals involving bad side effects.
"Celebrex, Vioxx, all of these drugs that popped up here recently with problems, are whole-body administered -- they go everywhere," Tomalia says. "They think they know where they have gone in all minute detail, and they think they know every enzyme and every receptor site, but you never really quite know."
The best-case scenario, Baker says, is nanotech-enabled cancer therapy in your doctors' office within five years. But that's assuming an accelerated approval process, being pushed by nanotech advocates, which is by no means a foregone conclusion. Left to the normal FDA process, it could be a decade or more.
"We've all got relatives or friends who have died from this," he says. "The therapy is almost worse than the disease." If nothing else, perhaps the end of painful chemotherapy is in sight. "If we can make the therapy nontoxic ... then that's much more practical."
wired.com |
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| To: Dr.Leonardo who wrote (37) | 7/28/2005 8:42:10 AM | | From: donpat | | | | Yes, indeed - I was just going to post the same story (different source)!
Here's mine:
MIT Engineers An Anti-Cancer Smart Bomb
Cambridge MA (SPX) Jul 28, 2005
Imagine a cancer drug that can burrow into a tumor, seal the exits and detonate a lethal dose of anti-cancer toxins, all while leaving healthy cells unscathed.
MIT researchers have designed a nanoparticle to do just that.
The dual-chamber, double-acting, drug-packing "nanocell" proved effective and safe, with prolonged survival, against two distinct forms of cancers--melanoma and Lewis lung cancer--in mice.
The work will be reported in the July 28 issue of Nature, with an accompanying commentary.
"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.
The team loaded the outer membrane of the nanocell with an anti-angiogenic drug and the inner balloon with chemotherapy agents. A "stealth" surface chemistry allows the nanocells to evade the immune system, while their size (200 nanometers) makes them preferentially taken into the tumor. They are small enough to pass through tumor vessels, but too large for the pores of normal vessels.
Once the nanocell is inside the tumor, its outer membrane disintegrates, rapidly deploying the anti-angiogenic drug. The blood vessels feeding the tumor then collapse, trapping the loaded nanoparticle in the tumor, where it slowly releases the chemotherapy.
The team tested this model in mice. The double-loaded nanocell shrank the tumor, stopped angiogenesis and avoided systemic toxicity much better than other treatment and delivery variations.
But it is patient survival and quality of life that really inspire this research, Sasisekharan said. Eighty percent of the nanocell mice survived beyond 65 days, while mice treated with the best current therapy survived 30 days. Untreated animals died at 20.
"It's an elegant technique for attacking the two compartments of a tumor, its vascular system and the cancer cells," said Judah Folkman of Children's Hospital Boston. "This is a very neat approach to drug delivery," said MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer.
The nanocell worked better against melanoma than lung cancer, indicating the need to tweak the design for different cancers. "This model enables us to rationally and systematically evaluate drug combinations and loading mechanisms," says Sasisekharan. "It's not going to stop here. We want to build on this concept."
spacedaily.com
Nano certainly is doing wonderful, amazing, things and will be the saviour of us all, eventually. |
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| To: donpat who wrote (38) | 7/28/2005 7:37:38 PM | | From: jmhollen | | | | Hi guys,
Please note that if heps to post a link on PRs and News here to the Under 0.25 and Radne's Boards, since a lot of SI'rs may not have NNVC "..SubjectMarked.." yet...:
Message 21552338
I already took care of it for you this time......................
Check you mail box for appropriate and handy links.
John :-)
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| From: donpat | 8/2/2005 9:43:39 AM | | | | | | Nanotube-Laser Combo Selectively Targets Cancer Cells, Study Shows
[Another indication of the power in nano bio and its potential for mankind.]
SCIENCE NEWS
August 02, 2005
Carbon nanotubes--tiny straws of pure carbon--have many properties that make them attractive for applications as varied as nanoelectronics and nanofibers. Scientists are recruiting carbon nanotubes in the fight against cancer, too. A report published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that when paired with a modified laser beam, the rods can act as tiny heaters to selectively destroy tumor cells.
When exposed to near-infrared light, carbon nanotubes quickly release excess energy as heat. Nadine Wong Shi Kam and her colleagues at Stanford University exploited this property to attack cancerous cells. "One of the longstanding problems in medicine is how to cure cancer without harming normal body tissue," notes study co-author Hongjie Dai. Cancer cells tend to be coated in folate receptors, whereas normal cells are not. Thus to ensure that the carbon nanotubes were attracted only to diseased cells, the researchers coated them with folate molecules. The team then shined a flashlight-size near-infrared laser on aqueous solutions of both tumor and normal cells. Although harmless to regular cells, the light heated the nanotubes to 70 degrees Celsius within two minutes, killing the cancer cells they had invaded.
The researchers hope to refine the process for future use. "Folate is just an experimental model that we used," Dai says. "In reality there are more interesting ways we can do this. For example, we can attach an antibody to a carbon nanotube to target a particular type of cancer." To that end, Dai is currently investigating the possibility of using the technique on mice with lymphoma because lymphoma cells have well-defined surface receptors that can be targeted. --Sarah Graham
sciam.com |
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| From: jmhollen | 8/2/2005 1:29:11 PM | | | | | | PLEASE NOTE: The quotes screw-up on mafia.com is a MegaOpportunity for everyone, IMHO.
I also expect that we will see RTQs & Level-II for NNVC in the immediate future.
My 'reco' would be "..collect and hold.."!!!
John :-)
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| To: canbballtrader who wrote (42) | 8/2/2005 2:44:30 PM | | From: jmhollen | | | | Subject 55842
mafia.ocm = pinksheets.com. Less keystrokes, and it makes fun of the 'Streeter Stock' Snobs around here.....
NNVC is in the middle of their go-to-OTCBB audit, and blew off updating Pinksheets, so Pinksheets retaliated (..bunch of azzholes..) by stopping their quotes with no warning.
Free RealTime.com will give you Time & Sales on NNVC (..paying for FRT Express is recommended..), and you can interpolate from that. I just bought 30K at 0.018.
John :-)
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| To: rrufff who wrote (44) | 8/2/2005 5:24:53 PM | | From: jmhollen | | | | They're flying under the radar, doing the audit, and getting new products ready for launch.... ..Sounds like we'll get hit with a barrage next month....
Buy while the mafia.com quotes are hosed, when they're back (..with RTQs and L-II, I hope..) it should rebound quickly...
John :-)
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