io9: nanotubes

Nanotech And Lasers Team Up To Cure Cancer

Charlie Jane Anders — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:20:00 PDT

When nanotech and lasers team up, is there anything they can't do? Apparently not. New research shows a combined nanotube/laser treatment zaps kidney tumors in 80 percent of mice. Nanotech is teaming up with viruses to kill ovarian tumors, too.

Scientists at Wake Forest University injected multi-walled carbon nanotubes into tumors and then heated them up using a laser, a technique researchers have been talking about for a few years now. But what's exciting is the results of the latest study, published in the Procedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. The mice that received the highest level of treatment saw their tumors disappear completely in 80 percent of cases.

Says Nanowerk:

Using a mouse model, the researchers injected kidney tumors with different quantities of MWCNTs and exposed the area to a 3-watt laser for 30 seconds. They found that the mice that received no treatment for their tumors died about 30 days into the study. Mice that received the nanotubes alone or laser treatment alone survived for a similar length of time. However, in the mice that received the MWCNTs followed by a 30-second laser treatment, the higher the quantity of nanotubes injected, the longer the mice lived and the less tumor regrowth was seen. In fact, in the group that received the highest dose of MWCNTs, tumors completely disappeared in 80% of the mice. Many of those mice continued to live tumor free through the completion of the study, about 9 months later.

You could actually watch the tumors shrinking, say researchers. And the mice maintained their weight and appeared healthy and normal.

A separate bit of research is also encouraging. A new method of delivering diptheria toxin-encoding DNA into ovarian tumors is at least as effective as chemotherapy — with no harmful side effects. And it could be tested in humans as soon as 18 to 24 months from now. In a nutshell, researchers injected nanoparticles into the peritoneal cavity, where ovarian cancer first starts to spread. And the nanoparticles delivered diptheria toxin that was genetically engineered to attack only ovarian cells. The toxin destroyed cells' ability to manufacture proteins.

In the past, scientists have worked on using viruses to deliver toxin-encoding DNA to a tumor, but using biodegradable nanoparticles instead is safer. And the treatment could also work in brain, lung and liver cancers.
Image from Nanotechweb.

[Nanowerk and Nanowerk]

Carbon Nanotubes Cook Cancer

Michael Reilly — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:00:00 PDT

The world needs new ways of murdering cancer cells, and scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have delivered. Their weapon? The much-hyped carbon nanotube, which apart from being electrically conductive, able to be woven into stronger-than-steel fabrics, and just all-around awesome, also happens to useful as an anti-cancer smart missile. By attaching the tubes to an antibody that searches out cancers and binds to it, nanotech expert Pavitra Chakravarty and her colleagues found a way to deliver nanotubes to the cancer. Just about the only thing the tubes appear incapable of is carrying a warhead, though, so researchers fired near-infrared light at the tubes, heating them up until they cooked the cancer into oblivion.

Previous work with antibodies-as-cancer-killing-smart-missiles has involved attaching strong, nasty chemotherapy drugs to the antibodies. That's a good option, but even better would be to not have harsh chemicals circulating in your blood stream in the first place. Using nanotubes and infrared light is a good, pretty safe alternative because IR radiation doesn't damage living tissue. The only drawback is the tumors will need to be less than 1.5 inches deep in the body, about the limit for the radiation's effectiveness.

Source: UT Southwestern Medical Center

Nanotech Precisely Measures Spiciness So Your Tongue Doesn't Have To

Ed Grabianowski — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:00:00 PDT

The Scoville Units you see on the side of chili sauce bottles are measured subjectively by taste testers, who determine how hot a given hot sauce really is. But now a new nanotechnology will allow food scientists to quickly and cheaply measure the exact amount of capsaicinoids — the active component in chili peppers — in each spicy sample. Science gives us many wondrous things, but you probably never thought it would help prevent you from making bland chili.

The usual Scoville test involves diluting a sauce until taste testers can't detect heat anymore — the amount required to dilute it gives it a rating on the Scoville Scale. Chromatography can give you an accurate reading of capsaicinoids, but it's neither cheap nor easy. The new test uses carbon nanotube electrodes to draw in capsaicin molecules, which have a unique electrochemical response. When the capsaicinoids react, the device measures the current change and determines exactly how many were present. It can even translate this number into Scoville Units.

While the developers think this will be very useful in the food industry, where it can be deployed right on the production line, I've got a better idea. We can use it to develop a hot sauce so intense that we can cover our bodies with it to protect us from hungry robots. Image by: Viewoftheworld.

Chemists Measure Chilli Sauce Hotness With Nanotubes. [Science Daily]

Today A Nano-Radio, Tomorrow A Micro-Semiconductor

charliejane — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 06:30:23 PST

A radio made out of carbon nano-tubes could get better reception, than the current bulky silicon-based models. Researchers led by John Rogers at University of Illinois solved the amplification problems that had stymied previous nano-radios by making their radio on a quartz wafer the size of a grain of sand. The other big breakthrough: a method for making carbon nanotubes in perfectly aligned rows. The radio, which picked up a local traffic report, is just a proof of concept. The ultimate goal is a new breed of much faster semiconductor, thanks to the electrical properties of such tiny strands. [The Age]

NASA Wants To Slice Your Brain With Nanoknife

charliejane — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:30:34 PST

Carbon nano-tubes aren't just gorgeous, they might also save your brain one day. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is teaming up with a cancer center, City Of Hope, to develop a new minimally invasive type of brain surgery using carbon nanotubes. Researchers hope that these sharp-tipped tubes, 50,000 times narrower than a human hair, can deliver cancer-fighting agents directly to the brain. Tests in mice found the nanotubes were non-toxic and could deliver actual genetic information to the brain. Here's an image of the first "nanoknife," developed by NIST and University of Colorado in 2006. [ScienceDaily]

A Nanotech Twist on Silkworms

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:00:22 PST

Microchip construction has gone biological. UC Riverside announced last week that some of its researchers had discovered that the metal-corroding bacteria Shewanella extrude semi-conducting nanotubes that can be used for microchips or other tiny electronics devices. Here you can see a nest of Shewanella and tubes. (Nanotubes are semi-conductive, microscopic metal tubes, often considered the future of micro-electronics.) Will we start seeing biology branches at chip fabs?

Imagine vast bacteria farms, organically churning out nanotubes. It would be like a silkworm farm for nanopunks. Researcher Nosang Myung said:

We have shown that a jar with a bug in it can create potentially useful nanostructures.

Apparently, nobody knows exactly how the bacteria create the tubes, but scientists are already having some success manipulating their tubular output.

But wait, isn't incorporating biology into our electronics the first step to sentient machines and the Cylon revolution? Let's not worry about that now, kids.

Nanotube-producing bacteria [via The Biotech Weblog]