Disir
Platinum Member
- Sep 30, 2011
- 28,003
- 9,610
- 910
In 2010, Evelyn Sorensen, an art history professor in Arizona and a patient with stage II cervical cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes, was told by her doctor to go on vacation and say goodbye to her family, because she had a year to live. As she described in newspaper reports, rather than resign herself to this gloomy prediction, Sorensen insisted on seeing a list of clinical trials and learned of one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a company called BIND Biosciences was using super-small nanotechnology drones to attack tumors. She joined a trial run by Daniel Von Hoff of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and her tumors shrank 70 percent after her first treatment. Several years later, even though she was still on medication, doctors confirmed that her body still showed no evidence of cancer.
The clinical treatment Sorensen used is called BIND-014, a chemically coated nanoparticle designed to search for malignant cells and deliver potent doses of the chemotherapy drug docetaxel. The particle allows the drug to selectively collect at the cancer site, dramatically enhancing its effectiveness. Developed by Omid Farokhzad at Harvard Medical School, along with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, BIND-014 has been in phase II trials for various cancers, and positive results have been reported in nonsmall-cell lung cancer. Results in other trials, however, were sufficiently mixed to put the company into a brief period of financial jeopardy, emphasizing the newness and potential volatility of this industry.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-two-faces-of-nanotechnology
Ups and downs of nanotechnology 'splained.
As an aside, one of the biggest mistakes the US made was outsourcing R&D. The US should be leading in nanotechnology. There are moments in time where it would be nice if the congress didn't cave to their buddies.
The clinical treatment Sorensen used is called BIND-014, a chemically coated nanoparticle designed to search for malignant cells and deliver potent doses of the chemotherapy drug docetaxel. The particle allows the drug to selectively collect at the cancer site, dramatically enhancing its effectiveness. Developed by Omid Farokhzad at Harvard Medical School, along with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, BIND-014 has been in phase II trials for various cancers, and positive results have been reported in nonsmall-cell lung cancer. Results in other trials, however, were sufficiently mixed to put the company into a brief period of financial jeopardy, emphasizing the newness and potential volatility of this industry.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-two-faces-of-nanotechnology
Ups and downs of nanotechnology 'splained.
As an aside, one of the biggest mistakes the US made was outsourcing R&D. The US should be leading in nanotechnology. There are moments in time where it would be nice if the congress didn't cave to their buddies.
