Yesterday's talk was truly indisciplinary. The speaker, Dr Shuming Nie, holds joint appoinments in Chemistry, Materials Science & Engineering, and Hematology & Oncology. At two different institutions. Now that's multi-tasking!
I was late to the talk, so I missed a bunch of what Dr Nie had to say. I was particularly disappointed to be late because what I heard of the talk was very interesting. The idea that specially designed nano-particles could be injected into the blood stream and would then preferentially bind to cancer cells is fascinating. Even with my limited understanding of medicine I can see that it opens up whole new possibilities in cancer detection and, presumably, treatment.
But since I missed at least 50% of the Colloquium I will leave it there. I would like to see what others who heard more of the presentation have to say....
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2 comments:
I think his plots and images were very telling of the impact that this technology has. The rat that had saline injected versus the rat that had nanoparticle seeded chemo injected really showed this best. Inject saline (or, the "wait and see" approach) led to a ping pong ball sized tumor, while the nanoparticles left a tumor that looked to be the size of a (small) pencil eraser, which was just amazing.
I also think it's pretty nifty that they were doing Raman spectroscopy through the skin of the rats to determine that the nanoparticles were concentrating there, but it makes me wonder two things:
1.) Is this a test that's even required in human subjects when they start using the technology, or will they just trust that the nanoparticles are accumulating there?
and
2.) IF the test is required in humans, can we engineer the nanoparticles to react somehow with probes currently used in medical imaging technology, or will new imaging technology need to be designed to complement nanoparticles? If so, then this could lead to increased funding and effort in experiment and engineering in other fields (nuclear physics, perhaps?).
Somehow I expect that it would possibly be fairly straightforward to engineer the nanoparticles to resonate somehow and be detected with NMR, but I'm not an expert.
My comment comes from nearly the first thing Dr. Nie said. It's the idea that CT scans and MRI show large scale structure of growths or problems in the body, but do not show what is going on at small scales.
I am personally interested in preventative health measures rather than treating problems through drugs or surgery. Finding problems on the "gene or protein" scale as Dr. Nie said is very cool and would make treatment, if necessary, a lot easier and a lot less invasive.
Was I the only person thinking of Star Trek tricorders during his talk?
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