So in class we just read a paper entitled "Nanodiamond Therapeutic Delivery Agents Mediate Enhanced Chemoresistant Tumor Treatment" by Chow et al. (2011). This paper was pretty hard for me to read since so much of it seemed to consist of methods or results from treatments that looked similar to me. The basic gist is that during chemotherapy, the drugs that are added into your system get rejected by your body. This is one of the major problems with chemotherapy, since if your cells aren't getting the drugs, then it doesn't matter how effective the drugs are.
With the nanodiamonds, the drug will bind to the crystal, and then the diamond itself can get inside of the cells, which greatly increases the rate of success.
While I feel like I should be discussing this paper in a more scholarly manner. All that this article reminds me of is the book Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson. One of the main concepts in this book that blew my mind was that everything was nano. How you attacked people, and also how you cured people was through nanotechnology.
I really think that this technology is the direction that medicine is headed in. It will start with personalized medicine, and finding ways to make that cheaper and more accessible. Sending small tiny particles seems terrifying to me, although for medicine this is an amazing discovery. I do believe that the main thing about this that seems scary is that it contains the word "nano" which I associate with nanobots. The thought of having little tiny robots inside of me seems almost like an invasion of privacy on such a basic level. Even though the nano particles are not recording anything or really doing anything related to privacy, except I guess for being inside of my person.
One of the silly things about this article is how amazing it sounds. For almost all of the article, I was thinking, what's the catch? This sounds too good to be true. The main problem is that this has only been tested on mice. The crazy part is that this is about chemotherapy. Half of chemotherapy right now is that you are poisoning your body in the hope that the tumor cells die and enough of the rest of you stays alive. Almost any sort of medicine that we can discover at this point that is slightly less toxic or that has slightly better results, we should be implementing to try and make as many baby steps as quickly as we possibly can.
I hope that this technology translates over to humans, and that not only our treatments improve but also our research into preventing cancer.
I agree about the findings sounding too good to be true. I don't know if this is necessarily a problem with science, but scientists are heavily criticized when something like this gets applied to humans and something unexpected goes wrong. I'm sure this is why the authors were explicit that their work requires further study before any sort of human trials begin. I wonder why they didn't use any human cell lines in their study.
ReplyDeleteThe reason why I think they did not use human cell lines is because this paper wants to prove that the methodology is plausible in the whole animals. The problem with using cell lines is that:
ReplyDeletea) cell lines are not the same as normal cells, they tend to have been somehow immortalized with different methods, and they have also undergone some kind of adaptation to attach to the dishes.
b) cells can be manipulated to absorb and extract specific products, so the results may not be as trustable as whole animal studies.
what i really think was interesting in this article is that the authors did not explain how or why the chemicals unbind from the diamonds once they are inside the cells and not before