GUIDED NANOBOMBS

Marion, Linda, and me

That's my funeral bola tie.  Wonder where we were.

Back in the 1970s, I think it was, there was a particularly odious cigarette commercial involving some handsome and witty dude who defined a millimeter as “Like, small.”  Well, today we will consider the nanometer which is a unit of measurement equal to “like small” divided by ten million.  

A nanometer is equal to one billionth of a meter..  There is a thing called a “nanoparticle” that is to be visualized as a sphere less than 100 nanometers in diameter.  These tiny balls are increasingly important in cancer research; I have written about them several times, initially:

http://ljb-quiltcutie.blogspot.com/2012/04/good-things-come-in-tiny-pmedeieval.html

Nanoparticles are important because they can be used to deliver medicine to the right place, and only the right place.  Suppose you have just found some lethal organic compound that kills cancer cells quickly and without compunction.  You would like to inject it into your cancer patients.  However, there is a catch: this stuff kills healthy cells, too.  So, you are up a creek.  But wait: if you can encapsulate your poison in nanoparticles that are addressed specifically to tumor cells you are in gravy (your patients will live, and your Porsche is just around the corner.)

It seems that some clever people at Sloane Kettering are hot on the trail of such a combination.  They have discovered that the blood vessels in many types of tumor (including ovarian) “express” a protein that is not found elsewhere  in the body.  Using techniques that they must teach in the upper reaches of graduate school, they have created sugar-based nanoparticles that will bind to these proteins.  Next they stuff them with cancer poison and turn them loose.  In mice (poor devils) they work wonders.

Of course, there other cancer types that do not express this protein (it is called P-selectin).  However, it turns out that if you “stress” (their word) such a cancer with weak radiation they respond by beginning to express P-selectin (and thus sealing their own doom,)  Moreover, for reasons not well understood, tumors all over the body – not just the particular glob irradiated – begin to express  P-selectin, too.   The immune system probably is involved, they speculate.  However it works, this seems to offer a way to attack tumors that have metastasized.  Many more trials are in the offing.  Do not hold your breath. 

This is not a particularly easy article to wrap your brain around, but here it is:

http://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2016/nanoparticle-tumor-vessels?cid=eb_govdel

By the way:  Back many months ago I announced that the NCI, presumably for budgetary reasons, had cancelled their newsletter.  Well, maybe they hired the right lobbyist  or something but whatever: it’s back.  Just click on the Web address above, then on “Subscribe” and you will get lots more email.