The war on cancer has a new secret weapon: carbon nanotubes heated up via near-infrared light, scorching the cancerous cells inside the body. Developed by scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the nanotubes are stronger than steel and can be attached to an antibody that seeks out cancer cells and bind to them. At that point, the near-infrared light is beamed in, heating the tubes up until the cancer is roasted.
Previous work with these sorts of things have involved attaching chemo drugs to the antibodies, but this method doesn't require any harsh chemicals to be floating around inside your blood. There's no word on just when this will start being used in any type of widespread fashion, but we're hoping sooner rather than later.
UT Southwestern Medical Center, via io9
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By Churrito at 6:37 AM ON 06/18/08
yes ok, but we all know that the limitation of such systems is the antibody in question.... which antibody to se for which cancer? not much of step forward from what we have availale today, just a different way of killing cells. The bottle-neck still remains (antibody selection)
By red91791 at 2:11 PM ON 06/20/08
They had a story like a month ago on 60 minutes about a guy who did a similar(and in my opinion better) thing to this. He used gold nanotubes instead and heating them using high frequency radio waves. Completely harmless to everything but the tumor. Hes already doing tests on rats and other animals.