Nanotechnology

Here's a link to a happy press release from the American Association for Cancer Research, titled "Nanotechnology Brings Personalized Therapy 1 Step Closer to Reality." Very cool research coming out of Stanford University, and reported at an AACR conference a couple of days ago. It's all about nanotechnology, the science that looks at the smallest possible units of a cell. The research described here shows that nanotechnology can be used to look at changes in proteins while they interact with drugs or other cancer treatments. This technology can be used during drug trials to determine just how the drug is affecting the cancer cell (or not affecting it).

The researchers looked at cells from lymphoma patients, among others. Instead of performing a biopsy of a lymph node (which can be easy, like mine was, or very tough, if it's in a location that's hard to get to, like near the lungs), doctors can use either a blood sample or a needle aspiration (a really thin needle is inserted into the node and cells are drawn out). The cells are examined (maybe even very soon after treatment has been given) to determine if the drug hit the proteins that were targeted.

And this is what personalized medicine is all about: determining which treatments are working for which patients, and stopping the treatments if necessary and moving on to something else before wasting time, energy, money, and healthy cells. Sounds like it's a technique that might be available relatively soon, too.