nanoparticles

Five melanoma patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York are about to become subjects in the first human clinical trial approved by the Food and Drug Administration that uses inorganic material in the same way as a drug.

Dubbed Cornell dots (or "C dots" for short), the brightly glowing nanoparticles are silica spheres less than 8 nanometers (one-billionth of a meter) in diameter that hold dye molecules. Those spheres are basically glass, chemically inert and small enough to pass through the body and out in a urine stream, and for clinical use are coated with polyethylene glycol … Read more

Chemists at Bar-Ilan University in Israel say they have developed and successfully tested "killer paper" coated with silver nanoparticles--each roughly 1/50,000 the width of a human hair--that can fight bacteria such as E. coli and S. aureus.

Described in the American Chemical Society journal Langmuir, researcher Aharon Gedanken tells me that while colloidal silver is already widely used as an antimicrobial agent, what's new about his team's research is the process by which silver nanoparticles are deposited onto paper to develop antimicrobial properties.

The team was able to control both the thickness of the … Read more

To determine if there is cancer in one's lymph nodes, a typically advanced stage requiring more aggressive treatment, pathologists are stuck performing several specific, detailed tests that may or may not target the cancerous cells. Using the needle-in-a-haystack analogy would be apt.

But thanks to the work of researchers at the University of Missouri in Columbia, a technique using photoacoustics could scan a lymph node biopsy with laser pulses, whereby the pigment of melanin reacts to the laser's beam, absorbing the light, and heating and cooling (read: expanding and contracting) rapidly. This produces a popping sound that's … Read more

In 2008, scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Ovarian Cancer Institute developed a potential treatment to fight cancer using magnetic nanoparticles designed to attach themselves to cancer cells. They found in their groundbreaking tests on mice that the particles not only attached to cancer cells, but they also moved those cells.

In what may well prove to be some of the most exciting health news in the year to come, the group announced in the journal Nanomedicine in December and further publicized on Tuesday that it has replicated the study on human cancer cells, with the nanoparticles … Read more

Let's say you find a lump somewhere and decide to go in for an exam. And let's say there was a little box to check that allows you to get a shot that targets and kills cancerous cells right then and there, no surgery, no waiting, and possibly no radiation or chemo therapy down the road. Would you check the box?

Since time matters when it comes to cancer, the creation of a single nanoparticle--traceable in real time via MRI--that tags and zaps cancer cells all in one procedure has a team of researchers raising their eyebrows in … Read more

There are many medical conditions that involve medication with intermittent doses on an as-needed basis, and often, that medication cannot be taken orally.

Scientists have long struggled with how best to deliver medication under these circumstances, where the delivery system might meet three key needs: intermittent dosing, with extreme precision, over the long term.

Research led by Daniel Kohane at Children's Hospital Boston may have hit on an effective new approach: a tiny, implantable device that releases the medication through a membrane whose porousness responds to the switching on or off of a magnetic field.

The membrane is embedded … Read more

Breath might be tested to measure more than sobriety if researchers at the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute in Haifa, Israel, have anything to say. They've developed a sensor made from gold nanoparticles that is able to distinguish between the breath of those with lung cancer from those without.

The sensing technology, according to lead author Hossam Haick, does not require the exhalation to be pre-treated in any way; the resulting breath test is simple, affordable, and portable. (In existing tests, preconcentration of the biomarkers is required to improve detection.)

"We demonstrated that our device has a potential not … Read more

Nanoparticles have ever-cooler applications. Here's another.

Researchers in India are developing a silver nanoparticle gel to treat burn wounds that could be more effective than conventional gels.

Burned skin is especially vulnerable to infection. Silver has been used as a purifying agent since ancient times, and burn creams have been around for some 30 years.

Silver sulfadiazine and silver nitrate gels are used in burn treatment as antimicrobial agents to accelerate healing, but some gels can cause skin discoloration and damage cells.

The researchers at the Agharkar Research Institute and Nano Cutting Edge Technology reported successful lab tests of … Read more

In the future, your countertop could disinfect itself.

Researchers at Rice University and City College of New York have come up with a way to embed silver nanoparticles in vegetable oil-based paint. Early tests show that the material exhibits "efficient antibacterial activity" toward E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus.

Silver's antibacterial properties have been known since the age of the Roman Empire, but making nano-sized particles (nano particles measure less than 100 billionths of a meter long) and then fixing them in paints and coatings has typically been expensive and time consuming. The Rice and CCNY researchers devised … Read more