Posts Tagged ‘cancer’
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March 5th, 2010
Video perspectives
The American Chemical Society’s journal Physical Chemistry Letters has a nice series of video perspectives on papers it has recently published. This one, for example, features reseachers from Jin Zhong Zhang’s lab at CalTech speaking about their article Biomedical Applications of Shape-Controlled Plasmonic Nanostructures: A Case Study of Hollow Gold Nanospheres for Photothermal Ablation Therapy of Cancer.
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March 3rd, 2010
Anticancer gold complexes
The current issue of Chemistry – A European Journal leads with a nice paper entitled ”Stable Anticancer Gold(III)-Porphyrin Complexes: Effects of Porphyrin Structure”. Gold complexes have long been investigated as potential treatments of a variety of ailments, and this paper represents some of the very latest research in the field. A full abstract can be found here. -
December 29th, 2009
Nice nanomedicine blog
I came across this really nice post written by Aaron Saenz and thought I would mention here. He has commented on the recently released NIH roadmap to nanomedicine, which outlines how millions of dollars in funding can be awarded to key centres around the USA to promote frontiers of nanotechnology used to cure human illness. He has supplemented this with lots of nice links to interesting gold nanotechnology research around the USA – including a couple of nice youtube offerings… Well worth a look!
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November 20th, 2009
A couple of things catching the eye today….
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November 9th, 2009
New home for medical gold research?
Interesting local news story in the US, suggesting that a new integrated medical research facility in Texas might be the new home of CytImmune Sciences, the company developing gold nanoparticle-based anticancer drug delivery technology. The research centre could also include studies on early-stage Alzheimer’s using gold nanoparticles according to the article.
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November 3rd, 2009
Platinum, gold and fighting cancer
Many of you will probably have heard of Cisplatin, which is an effective platinum-based chemotherapy drug used in the treatment of a range of cancers. As with many cancer drugs, it does have a number of side-effects which can limit its use so ways of improving its delivery, and potentially lessening any side-effects, have long been sought.
This paper, recently published in JACS, describes attempts to do just that. The team, which was led by Chad Mirkin at Northwestern and Stephen Lippard at MIT, have attached a cisplatin prodrug to gold nanoparticles. The action of introducing these nanoparticles into cancer cells facilitated the reductive release of cisplatin from the prodrug, and the subsequent formation of a highly cytotoxic platinum complex. In some cases this complex was shown to be more cytotoxic than cisplatin alone, with the added bonus of having reduced platinum-associated toxicity.
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September 10th, 2009
Cancer nanomedicine efforts bolstered with $2.3M grant
I wrote a blog in August about an excellent nature nanotechnology paper from Vladamir Zharov’s team at the University of Arkansas which detailed their development of gold-coated carbon nanotubes, and the potential diagnostic and therapeutic applications of such materials. Now it has been announced that Professor Zharov and colleagues have been awarded a number of grants totalling $2.3M to continue their groundbreaking work in the field of cancer nanomedicine. Approximately half of the money has been earmarked for pre-clinical and clinical studies investigating the diagnosis of deadly breast cancer metastasis in its earliest stages using gold nanoparticle based technologies.
Congratulations to Professor Zharov and team on this significant award.
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August 31st, 2009
“Gold nanotech breath test may show lung cancer early”
The title of this post is a claim made in this article. Interesting piece of research, but the result that it ‘detected lung cancer with 86 percent accuracy’ suggests there is some way to go before it is a viable clinical method…….
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June 29th, 2009
RF heating for cancer treatment
A recent update on the gold-based RF heating method for cancer treatment developed by John Kanzius can be found here on the National Cancer Institute Bulletin.
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June 24th, 2009
MRS Bulletin article
The new issue of MRS Bulletin from the Materials Research Society contains a comprehensive review of gold nanoshell applications in cancer therapies and diagnostics.
Trevor Keel
Richard Holliday
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