Sunday, July 22, 2007

Delivering Your Star Trek-ian Universe Under Budget, and 300 Years Ahead of Schedule

This just in, from the alma mater of a couple of my brothers, the University of Utah in Salt Lake City:

NANOBUBBLES DELIVER TARGETED CANCER DRUGS USING ULTRASOUND

A new targeted drug delivery method uses ultrasound to image tumors, while also releasing the drug from "nanobubbles" into the tumor.

Cancer drugs can be targeted to tumors by delivering them in packets of nanoparticles, then releasing them with ultrasound. But this approach can be difficult because it requires a way to image the tumor prior to treatment.

Natalya Rapoport, Ph.D., D.Sc., of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and colleagues describe a new method of drug delivery that may address this problem. Their study appears in the July 10 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Nanobubbles filled with the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin were injected into mice. The bubbles accumulated in the tumors, where they combined to form larger "microbubbles." When exposed to ultrasound, the bubbles generated echoes, which made it possible to image the tumor. The sound energy from the ultrasound popped the bubbles, releasing the drug. In mice treated with this method, the nanobubbles were more effective at blocking tumor growth than other nanoparticle delivery methods.

"Microbubble formulations have been developed for combining ultrasonic tumor imaging and ultrasound-enhanced chemotherapeutic treatment," the authors write.

3 Comments:

Blogger erp said...

Lots of interesting cancer therapies. My husband had a cancerous tumor removed from his bladder and then was treated with BCG (bacillus Calmette-Guerin), a live bacteria which obligingly only eats cancer cells. Amazingly, several months after the original scare and the cancer is gone.

Like the treatment described in this article, there is precious little good news on medical research in the media because research facilities want to keep those grants coming.

July 22, 2007 10:45 AM  
Blogger Susan's Husband said...

There's yet another new targeted treatment out, where the drugs are embedded in liposomes and target DNA that encodes for a protien that's generated only in cancer cells.

July 22, 2007 2:02 PM  
Blogger Oroborous said...

While I don't see cancer going away entirely, and there's no "silver bullet", it is heartening to see the progress being made.

July 23, 2007 9:10 AM  

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