Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. There are some forms of cancer which can be cured relatively well with known and established drugs and surgery. However, not all forms of cancer response to these approaches.

Medical researcher and educator Paula Hammond with her colleagues at MIT engineered a nanoparticle one-hundredth the size of a human hair that can treat the most aggressive, drug-resistant cancers.

”Using molecular engineering we can actually design a superweapon that can travel through the blood stream, it has to be tiny enough to get through the blood stream, it’s got to be small enough to penetrate the tumor tissue and it’s got to be tiny enough to be taken up inside the cancer cell”.

Our Splice Summer Edition brings you an interesting Ted talk “A new superweapon in the fight against cancer” where Paula Hammond explains how they created this molecular superweapon and using it successfully decreased tumor growth or even eliminated tumors in animals with aggressive breast cancer in only two weeks. Enjoy!

 

By Katarina Kovac, PhD, BioSistemika LLC