0.7 21st century technology, digital displacement, and the role of  (Page 13/17)

A very serious problem in chemotherapy cancer treatment has been that in injections of even the most potent anti-cancer drugs, very few of the drug molecules hit their target – perhaps 1 in 100,000. Some are filtered out by the liver, others by blood vessels. As a result, the drugs have to be administered in very high doses, often with devastating side effects from toxicity. But Scientists in the Houston Alliance for Nanohealth are now devising 3 stage nanorockets to deliver efficiently drug particles in far greater numbers to tumors with far less side effects. This is a rifle shot on cancer rather than a shotgun blast. The 3-stage nanocarrier is injected into the bloodstream. The first stage seeks out the abnormal blood vessels around a tumor. As the first stage degrades, it releases the second: nanoparticles that burrow through the vessel to open a pathway for the medication to kill the cancer cells.

Other approaches to efficacious drug delivery using nanotechnology have been the development of nano-bubbles by clinicians at Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center together with faculty at Rice and Baylor Medicine. This process uses light-gathering nanoparticles to transform laser energy into plasmonic nano-bubbles (M.D. Anderson, Bulletin, April 16, 2012).

This approach delivers cancer drugs or other therapeutic cargo at the level of the single cell. The researchers have found the delivering very strong chemotherapy drugs with nano-bubbles was up to 30 times more deadly to cancer cells than traditional drug treatment. Also, the treatment required one tenth the clinical dose, thereby reducing harmful side effects. See the following papers:
Biomaterials . 2012 Jul; 33(21):5441-50. Epub 2012 Apr 20. “Cell-specific transmembrane injection of molecular cargo with gold nanoparticle-generated transient plasmonic nanobubbles,” Lukianova-Hleb EY, Wagner DS, Brenner MK, Lapotko DO. Source: Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
Biomaterials . 2012 Feb; 33(6):1821-6. Epub 2011 Dec 2. “Plasmonic nanobubble-enhanced endosomal escape processes for selective and guided intracellular delivery of chemotherapy to drug-resistant cancer cells,” Lukianova-Hleb EY, Belyanin A, Kashinath S, Wu X, Lapotko DO. Source: Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
Journal Article Advanced Materials (impact factor: 8.38). 03/2012; 24(28):3831-7. DOI:10.1002/adma.201103550 “Plasmonic nanobubbles enhance efficacy and selectivity of chemotherapy against drug-resistant cancer cells,” Ekaterina Y Lukianova-Hleb, Xiaoyang Ren, Joseph A Zasadzinski, Xiangwei Wu, Dmitri O Lapotko. Source: Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.

Finally, conventional wisdom has long held that quantum entanglements did not apply to biological systems. But recent research now suggests that entanglement may be essential for the vital biological process, photosynthesis (See Sarovar, Ishizaki, et. al, “Quantum Entanglement in Photosynthetic Light-Harvesting Complexes,” Nature Physics 6, 462–467 (2010). Also, birds are apparently endowed with a magnetism sensitive molecule that serves as a compass. Last year, researchers found that within that molecule, electrons remain entangled 10 to 100 times longer than the formulas of physics predict ( Scientific American , November 2009). So, entanglement seems to be present also in large, warm systems including living organisms. Could entanglement then become a major focus in biomedicine? (See also Gauger, Rieper, et. al “Sustained Quantum Coherence and Entanglement in the Avian Compass,” Physical Review Letters , Vol. 106(4), Jan. 2011).