Cancer Treatment - New Technique Targets And Destroys Cancer Cells

A new method of targeting and destroying cancer cells was outlined during a recent presentation made at the 63rd annual meeting of the American Physical Society. This method of destroying cancer cells is based on increasing the temperature of these cancer cells, whilst ensuring that healthy tissue surrounding these cancer cells remains at normal body temperatures. This method was developed by two researchers at Virginia Tech, together with another researcher based at the Jadavpur University, in Kolkata, India.

The complex task of increasing the temperature of cancer cells whilst maintaining the surrounding healthy tissue at normal body temperature is achieved through the use of ferrofluids, which are liquids that become strongly magnetized when subjected to a magnetic field.

Professor Ishwar Puri, one of the Virginia Tech researchers who developed this method of destroying cancer cells, issued the following statement regarding this technique: “These fluids can then be magnetically targeted to cancerous tissues after intravenous application. The magnetic nanoparticles, each billionths of a meter in size, seep into the tissue of the tumor cell due to the high permeability of these vessels. The ideal hyperthermia treatment sufficiently increases the temperature of the tumor cells for about 30 minutes while maintaining the healthy tissue temperature below 41 degrees Celsius. Our ferrofluid-based thermotherapy can be also accomplished through thermoablation, which typically heats tissues up to 56 degrees C to cause their death, coagulation, or carbonization by exposure to a noninvasive radio frequency, alternating current magnetic field. Local heat transfer from the nanoparticles increases the tissue temperature and ruptures the cell membranes.”