|
In the push to meet the National
Cancer Institute's Challenge Goal of eliminating
suffering and death due to cancer by 2015, few areas of research are poised
to make as big a contribution as is cancer
nanotechnology. Already, the marriage of
cancer biology and nanotechnology is generating
revolutionary methods for detecting
and treating cancer that are on the
path to clinical use. Already, nanotechnologyhas yielded new tools that are accelerating
the pace of discovery from our
nation's cancer centers and research laboratories.
Already, this science of the very
small is attracting the brightest researchers
from a wide variety of scientific and engineering
disciplines to bring their talents to
bear on the problems of transforming cutting edge research into clinical advances.
"The application of nanotechnology to
cancer research could not come at a more
opportune time given the recent exponential increase in our understanding of the
process of how cancer develops," says
Andrew von Eschenbach, M.D., director
of the National Cancer Institute. "It is my
belief that nanomaterials and nanodevices
will play a critical and unique role in turning
that knowledge into clinically useful
advances that detect and interact with the
cancer cell and its surroundings early in
this process. By doing so, we will change for the better the way we diagnose, treat,
and ultimately prevent cancer."
An example can serve to highlight the
enormous potential of cancer nanotechnology
for changing the detection and therapy paradigm. Paras Prasad, Ph.D., a
professor of chemistry at the University of
Buffalo, and Raoul Kopelman, Ph.D., a
professor of chemistry, physics, and
applied physics at the University of Michigan, have developed nanoparticles—
imagine tennis balls 1/10,000th the size of
the head of a pin—that can detect tiny
tumors in a living animal and at the same time deliver potent, light-activated cell
killers just to the tumors whose location
they've just pinpointed.
But that's not all. Once
these nanoparticles have
arrived at the tumors, and
the drugs inside of them are activated using tiny fiber
optic lasers, the nanoparticles can then
reveal if the therapy is actually killing cancer cells. "The idea that the same single
injection of an agent can detect, treat and
report on the success of therapy is something that only nanotechnology can
achieve," says Dr. Kopelman.
This is NOT a new science—
and that's good
Today, the work of researchers such as Dr.
Kopelman and Dr. Prasad have made nanotechnology
a hot topic, the subject of increasing public attention and news coverage.
Some may look upon this newfound attention as just the latest example of "the
next hot thing," another dot.com bubble
in the making. But what's unusual about all of this nanotechnology hoopla is that it is
actually late in coming, because the fact of the matter is that chemists, physicists, engineers
and biologists have been engaged, quietly, in nanotechnology research long
before anyone even thought about the
word nanotechnology. Dr. Kopelman's work, for example, has received NCI support,
through the Unconventional Innovations Program, since 2000.
In fact, many chemists and biologists
argue that they have been working at the
nanoscale—the realm that stretches
from 1-100 nanometers in length—
since the early days of the 20th century.
A typical protein such as hemoglobin,which carries oxygen through
the bloodstream, is 5 nanometers, 5
billionths of a meter, in diameter.
Most drug molecules are actually
smaller than a nanometer, while the
atoms of silicon that make up a
computer chip are spaced about
1/10th of a nanometer apart.
But working with and studying
atoms and molecules, proteins and DNA, in general, are not what
researchers refer to when they talk
about nanotechnology. While many definitions of nanotechnology exist,
most experts follow the lead of the U.S.
National Nanotechnology Initiative
(NNI)'s definition, which refers to nanotechnology
as the field of science that involves all of the following:
• Research and technology development
at the atomic, molecular or macromolecular
levels, in the length scale of approximately 1-100 nanometer range.
• Creating and using structures, devices
and systems that have novel properties
and functions because of their small and/or intermediate size.
• Ability to control or manipulate on the
atomic scale.
Based on this definition, the birth of nanotechnology can be traced to 1985 and
two developments that each led to Nobel
Prizes. The first took place at IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, where
physicists Gerd Binnig, Ph.D., and
Heinrich Rohrer, Ph.D., invented the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), which
for the first time gave scientists the ability
to see individual atoms in a material and
move them around, atom by atom. The
pair of physicists first published their
work in 1985 and were awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics in 1986.
|