***Sad Update: The Cancer Pioneer has Died ***
A while back we looked into the exciting research being done by John Kanzius and his idea that radio waves could be used to kill cancer cells while leaving normal cells intact. His basic idea was to heat up the cancer cells with non-invasive radio frequencies (RF) and burn them alive. The tough part was determining how to only target cancer cells...
Well - there's been some great progress.
Kanzius is working with Dr. Stephen Curley, at the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, with a team also working in Kanzius' home town of Erie, Pennsylvania. They have been doing Phase I trials trying to find nano-particles that will attach to cancer cells but not healthy cells, and that will also heat up in reaction to radio waves to kill the cancer.
In the December 19th issue of the Journal of Experimental Therapeutics and Oncology was an article detailing the progress of the research, and it's looking pretty good. (read the article in PubMed here)
Right now by using gold nano-particles that attach to certain proteins in liver and pancreas cancers they have been able to kill over 99.8% of the cancer cells with only 5 minutes exposure. The control cancer cells (breast cancer cells that don't react with the protein) were not impacted, nor were healthy exposed to the same nano-particles.
Some of you may know that radio frequency is already used to treat some cancers - so you ask, why is this such a breakthrough?
Well, right now all we have are invasive-RF treatments, which means a radioactive particle needs to be injected directly into the tumor for it to work; we don't have a good way to reach deep tumors or blood cancers - or any cancer that isn't right near the surface. Using nano-particles that can "hunt down" cancer cells but bounce off healthy cells would allow this technology to massively expand and might be a side-effect-free cure for most or all cancers.
According to the Kanzius Research website, the next step is to exhaust more experiments in vitro (not in people or animals (which is in vivo) but in petri-dishes) and publish many more articles, with the eventual goal of FDA approval of human and animal testing. They are hoping to begin Phase II, human tests, in 2010 - after completing as many publications and studies as possible in 2009.
These first results are very promising, but there are still a lot of things to be ironed out before human testing is allowed. Hopefully everything goes as planned and we are on track to find better ways to get rid of those mutants.
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