Cancer Facts - Nanotechnology in cancer treatment

Hi this is Dr. David Cathcart. I'm from Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, Missouri. There is some exciting new technology out there in cancer treatment and it is called nanotechnology and nanotechnology was developed in the 1980's and was originally designed with the idea in mind that we could build very small machines if you will of molecules that do work for us. They may build other types of molecules. Technically speaking nanotechnology or nano instruments will take an atom of one cell and put it in place of another specific cell and build these molecules step by step until they get bigger and bigger. Well there is a very interesting application for nanotechnology with respect to medicine and particulary in the treatment of cancer and that is called the Trojan Horse Concept. These nano molecules are extremely small. They range in the order of 1 nanometer to maybe as much as a thousand nanometers. Now just to give you a comparison of what that is a nonmeter is one billionth of a meter and a meter is a little larger than a yard so one billionth of a meter is a nanometer. To give an idea in reality so we can get our hands around that a nanometer to a meter would be the same as comparing a marble to the Earth, the size of the Earth so these nano instruments or nano molecules are very very small. Now the Trojan Horse Concept is pretty cool. One example is something called the dendrometer and these dendrometer molecules, very small have multiple arms on them and we can attach food on one of the arms such as folic acid which is a nutrient for a cancer cell and a cancer killing agent such as Methotrexate on another arm while the cancer killing agent such as Methotrexate on another arm while the cancer cell is full of the thinking and hears food source so it accepts the nanomolecule, the Trojan Horse into its walls thinking that it is food only to find out when it is too late that Methotrexate has been unleashed inside the cancer cells killing it. These nanomolecules are so small that they can go in and out of the pores of these cells. They are very many many times smaller than most cells and they can go in and out of the pores and blood vessels. So while nanotechnology is exciting it is still in the experimental stage and it will probably be a few more years before we see it in mainstream treatment of medicine but the cool thing about nanotechnology particularly in the treatment of cancer is that it will help us to avoid many of the side effects that are so dangerous, the side effects of hair loss, the side effects of nausea, the side effects of losing hearing all these things are very common to normal chemotherapy patients nowadays, nanotechnology helps promise to help avoid some of those side effects while vastly improving our ability to treat and cure cancer. This is Dr. David Cathcart and thanks for letting me talk to you about nanotechnology.