chemotherapy

In the video game Re-Mission, players are tasked with piloting the microscopic robot Roxxi to blast away cancer cells as she navigates the bodies of fictional cancer patients.

A new study that took real-time functional MRI scans of 57 people randomly assigned to either play the game or watch it being played has found that those who played exhibited increased activity in the brain's positive motivation circuits, while those who merely observed exhibited no increase in activity.

"Identifying a direct connection between the stimulation of neural circuits and game play is a key step in unlocking the potential … Read more

Could a shot in the arm help destroy a growing tumor? That concept is looking more and more plausible.

Scientists have been investigating the potential of vaccines to prevent various types of cancer for several years. In 2010, one study found that a single vaccination prevented breast cancer tumors from forming in mice.

A team of researchers at the National Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology now is reporting in the journal Clinical Cancer Research that a vaccine might show promise in treating (as opposed to preventing) both metastatic breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

Led by cancer … Read more

Radiation therapy requires oxygen to be effective, which makes cancers that tend to be hypoxic (meaning they are deprived of oxygen)--such as pancreatic and cervical cancers--harder to treat. (Tumors can become hypoxic for a few reasons, e.g. they grow so quickly they actually outgrow blood supply, or cells proliferate so many times that the density taxes the available oxygen.)

So researchers at Purdue have been building and testing tiny devices that can be implanted in tumors and then generate oxygen, thereby making the area far more susceptible to radiation and chemotherapy.… Read more

New technology out of Georgia Tech may reduce the number of pills people with multiple prescriptions need to take every day--or that Ray Kurzweil takes to try and live long enough to become immortal. That's because researchers have developed a new gelcap with multiple compartments that can be used to take different drugs at the same time.

Right now the hydrogel capsules are very tiny--just one micron across--and no one's actually tried to fill one with medication yet. But the researchers say a meta-pill could have significant advantages, like being able to suppress resistance to certain drugs by co-mingling them with medications that counter adverse effects. The one-shot capsules could also afford more precise control over dosages, and, of course, could mean less time spent organizing pills.

What's cool about the multi-compartment pills is that they can deliver two very different kind of drugs at the same time--those that can dissolve in water, and those that are hydrophobic, or generally repelled by water (think of how cooking oil refuses to mix with water). This is done by inserting microscopic polymer chains in the pill. The hydrophobic drugs are trapped within nanoparticles assembled from the polymer chains.… Read more

Originally developed in the early 1990s to promote plant growth on board space shuttles, the light technology behind NASA's Astroculture 3 is now being repurposed to help soothe the painful side effects that can result from chemotherapy and radiation treatment in patients with bone marrow and stem cell transplants.

The treatment device, called WARP 75, uses High Emissivity Aluminiferous Luminescent Substrate, or HEALS, which lets LED chips function at their maximum irradiance--the equivalent light energy of 12 suns from each of the device's 288 grain-of-salt-sized LEDs--without emitting heat.

Researchers studied the effects of the technology to treat oral mucositis… Read more