National Cancer Institute’s Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer has a fascinating review article on the current state of nanotechnology in oncological imaging, and the way it will change the future of diagnosing and treating cancer. From the article:
For Jeff Bulte, Ph.D., an associate professor of radiology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, there is little doubt how nanoparticle-enabled imaging can help cancer therapy. Working with Carl Figdor, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in The Netherlands, Bulte has been testing the use of iron oxide nanoparticles to track how dendritic cells move through the body. Dendritic cells are candidates for triggering immune responses that would kill tumors, but for these cells to do their job they must first be injected into a patient’s lymph nodes. In fact, by labeling dendritic cells with magnetic nanoparticles and tracking them using MRI, the researchers found that interventional radiologists were successful only half the time at injecting these cells into lymph nodes and not into the surrounding tissues. “Now, with magnetic nanoparticles, we can use a widely available imaging method, MRI, to ensure that we’ve accurately delivered therapeutic cells to the exact spot where they can do their job,” says Bulte.
Then, there are the multifunctional nanodevices designed to be both imaging agent and anticancer drug. For example, James Baker Jr., M.D., director of the Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and Biological Sciences and director of an NCI-funded Cancer Nanotechnology Platform Partnership team, has been heading a research effort aimed at developing tumor-targeting dendrimers that contain both imaging agent and therapeutic agent. In a recent paper, Baker’s team described its work with a dendrimer linked to a fluorescent imaging agent and paclitaxel, and showed that this agent can identify tumor cells and kill them simultaneously…
Read the whole thing…
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