by Jeff Franklin

Created on: May 23, 2008   Last Updated: February 03, 2012

Nanotechnology Used in Cancer Treatment in Layman's Terms

It is dark. A very obese looking shape is seen hailing a taxi. The taxicab stops. The shape gets in. It says to the driver, "take me to the address of that cancer cell. I'm going to kill that scumbag."

The viral-looking driver complies and speeds through the fluid streets and corridors - passing through ever narrower passageways until the address is reached.

"Here's the money; keep the change," the obese object says to the driver. It jumps out.

The passenger is last seen penetrating the address. A small explosion occurs inside the premise and it collapses in a cloud of black dust. The collapse was so precise, that it didn't even faze the adjacent brownstone apartments.

Now, I've used a humorous story analogy to explain how nanotechnology will soon be used to kill cancer cells and possibly cure cancer.

For starters, the prefix, "nano", means very, very small. One nanometer is one billionth of a meter, one millionth of a millimeter, and one thousandth of a micron. The only definable scientific unit smaller than a nanometer is the Angstrom Unit - one ten billionth of a meter or ten times smaller than a nanometer. For comparison, you could put roughly 50,000 nanometers side by side to equal the width of a hair.

One promising application of nanotechnology is in the medical field of cancer treatment. Spherical nanoparticles one nanometer in diameter, are small enough to be at the molecular level or single cell level in living organisms. Spherical particles of this size are created with a protein shell and are filled with cancer cell killing chemicals and/or weak radioisotopes for the purpose of targeting and destroying cancer cells, like certain types of cancer basil, tumor stem or other types of cancer cells, without "collateral" cell damage, as is common with traditional chemotherapy.

Now, getting back to our analogy and how this works. For this to work, you need two mechanisms. One is a means of nanoparticle transport or "vector", (carrier, the taxicab in the analogy). The other is the recognition of receptors on the target cancer cells - we'll call the "address" of these cells.

Now the nanoparticle (the obese "passenger" in the analogy) has an "anti-receptor" on its protein surface that seeks out the receptor shape (or specific address type) on the cancer cell and fits together like two puzzle pieces when joined up. Once the nanoparticle "finds" the cancer cell (the "address" destination for the taxicab), it is engineered to penetrate the wall of the cancer cell and position itself within the cell. Then once inside, its protein wall dissolves or explodes and releases the anticancer toxins within the cancer cell. Then it's bye, bye; death, to the cancer cell. The surrounding healthy cells (the adjacent brownstones in our story) are not affected. This keeps collateral cell damage to a very minimum.

Usually, an engineered virus or a non-reproducing bacteria (a virus or bacterium designed to seek out and recognize certain cancer cells) is used as the "taxicab", the carrier (vector), to transport the toxin-laden nanoparticle to its target in the blood stream (the "fluid" streets and corridors in our story).

Some nanoparticles may be designed as if, "smart" or "intelligent" in that, they may not even need a receptor/anti-receptor "guidance system". In addition, the new research of these wondrous nanoparticles may not need a viral vector or carrier to be able to seek, engage and destroy the target cancer cells.

Hopefully, this new cancer fighting application of nanotechnology will be successful and in the very near future of our war on cancer.

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