Cooking Cancer with Magnetic Nanoparticles And Hyperthermia

Hi, I'm Hui Huang, and I'm Dr. James Hainfeld, and we've had a breakthrough toward curing cancer with magnetic nanoparticles. The concept behind this is simple. If you put iron particles in an alternating magnetic field, they flip back and forth, and create a lot of heat. If they were inside a tumor, you would cook the cancer. Researchers have been trying to make this work for years, but the problem is, iron is toxic at therapeutic levels. You can avoid poisoning the body by directly injecting into the tumor, however, this misses many areas, and the tumor regrows. We thought a better way would be to use intravenous, or i.v. injection: Simply inject into a vein, and let the circulatory system do a more even delivery to the cancer, wherever it's found. To do this, we first had to make our iron particles very non-toxic. Here at Nanoprobes, we engineered a nanoparticle with an iron core, and wrapped it in a biocompatible shell. The iron core will still react to a magnetic field, but it's kept safely out of direct contact with the body. The next problem was targeting. Our magnetic nanoparticles have to leave the bloodstream, and specifically target the tumor. We decided to take advantage of a natural property of cancer called EPR. Since tumors are growing, they call on the body to create lots of new blood vessels, in and around them. New blood vessels are leaky, so anything of a particular size in the bloodstream will pass through and accumulate in the tumor, but stay out of healthy areas. Once we got our nanoparticles to just the right size, it worked! In our lab animals, after i.v. injection, the tumors became highly loaded, with 16 times the concentration in the tumor compared to the adjacent, healthy tissue. The next step was to put our test animals inside a rapidly alternating magnetic field. Using an infra-red camera to measure temperature, we can see it working. The tumors easily heat up to a lethal temperature; they actually liquefy-- while surrounding, healthy tissue stays cool and unharmed. The results are dramatic. With a single, three-minute treatment, the tumors are completely eradicated, with a precision finer than a surgeon's knife. We've achieved an actual cure rate of 78-90% in mice. It's also great news for combination therapy, where heating is used to greatly amplify chemo and radiation. So far, it's been difficult to heat deep tumors, but magnetic heating is perfect for this. The next steps are really exciting. We're working with the National Institutes of Health, in preparation for FDA approval. We need to bring this to patients as soon as possible. There's a long road of testing ahead, but we're very hopeful, with these very promising results. To learn more, please visit us at Nanoprobes.com . Nanoprobes.com : Nanoparticle Research Collaborative Dedicated to finding cures for cancer and other diseases All profits support our research. Brought to you by Nanoprobes.com