Beyond Science Fiction
As you head for the beach with a canvas bag full of science fiction, the activities of one of the world's great inventors will top anything you or your favorite author can possibly conjure up. This year's winner of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT award for invention, Dr. Joe DeSimone, (full disclosure -- the author is a shareholder and advisor to Liquidia, a company founded by DeSimone) has been designing nano-particles in his lab at the University of North Carolina that are 100 times smaller than a red blood cell and as smart as a microprocessor. He has discovered that size and shape really do matter and when these properties can be precision-controlled the sky is the limit. Lately DeSimone has been concentrating on nano-medicine. He's been working on some remarkable projects.
-- By altering the size, shape and modulus of particles substantially smaller than a human cell DeSimone can direct them to a particular cell or group of cells within a particular organ in the body. He can also load the particles with a particular drug therapy by constructing nano-sized compartments within a tiny "ice tray" and filling the compartments with the desired drug or therapy. At MIT on Thursday night, DeSimone showed YouTube-quality videos of his particles approaching and entering targeted cells and then dropping their cargo virtually on demand. This performance created audible gasps from a group of distinguished scientists of all ages that had assembled for the ceremony.
The first frontier for this breakthrough may be oncology where such targeted drug delivery is obvious. If you can kill the "bad cells" without touching the good ones entirely new ways of thinking about cancer therapies are on the table. The work is still in its infancy but good results have already been obtained in prostate and ovarian cancer cells.
-- DeSimone is using these same principles to produce particles that mimic red blood cells. Not only do these particles look and act like red blood but they are "smart" as well. What this means is they can be designed to circulate in targeted parts of the body and not others (their shape and modulus confine them to specified parts of the circulatory system). They can also be designed to circulate for a specified period of time and then be excreted (this is effectuated by the particles changing in shape and flexibility over time). A therapy that can be infused into a particle that will circulate like blood in the body for a given period of time and then be excreted would have profound implications for the delivery of all kinds of drug therapies. Intra-venous transfusions might be replaced by drug infused particle injections. Vaccines that require multiple doses to be effective may be delivered via a smart particle that can achieve the same result. Again, full implementation of the technology has not been achieved but the platform has been created.
-- Even further out, at least from the perspective of a non-scientist like me, DeSimone and his colleagues are working to deliver a therapy called "silencing RNA" or siRNA. The theory behind this approach, which many believe will be foundational for the future of drug therapy, is that certain diseases can be cured even before they manifest themselves by identifying the proteins that cause them and then preventing those proteins from every firing. The trick is achieving "knock down" by altering the functioning of targeted proteins within a designated cell -- no trivial task. Because DeSimone can produce smart but tiny particles and they can be infused with a cargo that may achieve "knock down" one of the big barriers to unlocking the promise of siRNA may be addressed with revolutionary consequences for the way we think about treating disease.
Of course, there are huge hurdles associated with each example, not the least of which being how to produce huge quantities of custom designed particles all with exactly the same characteristics. But even what has been achieved so far provides a sense of what's possible and will provide the basis for scores of other ideas some of them conceived on the Fourth of July in between sessions with a great science fiction novel.
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I for one welcome our new microscopic overlords.
Fascinating discoveries. However, nanoparticles are already being dispersed throughout the environment, with potentially devastating blowback.
How the human organism will survive the onslaught of man's own intellect is the question.
The further we delve into things, the greater our ability to totally and irrevocably fuck everything completely up. So far, with our great discoveries and inventions, we have nearly destroyed our planet.
Lest we leave one little, tiny, nano-thing unscrewed up, let's hasten and get to them, in the name of medicine.
Nanobio is definitely the science of our century, good or bad. Lets hope the hopeful people get a hold of it before the Bush people. It is both miraculous and frightening.
It is wonderful to think about.
I wish it-him-them every success
Yeah, my experience has been that these so called breakthroughs take about a centruy to come to fruitful practice. So basically for me and others presently it is Science Fiction.
A way to make small particles that move randomly (commonplace), stick to selected cell types (old news) and then merge into the cell interior (the big, new news) could indeed be enormously important.
Calling a particle of this sort "as smart as a microprocessor", on the other hand, is pure hype. There's a long way to go to get anywhere near that ability.
1) They are nowhere near as smart as the desktop "supercomputers"* that are distant descendents of the original microprocessors, but...
2) The original Intel 4004 only had 2300 transistors. The 8008 (for which I am proud to say I still have an original MCS-8 manual) had 3500 transistors.
3) The microprocessor is only part of a small gaggle of chips, so it doesn't fully express what's going on, so...
4) With a bit of stretching or mild exaggeration, these artfully shaped little particles in concert with the cells have similar levels of utility.
So, it's hyperbole, but not pure hype, and research in the nanoparticle world is likely to lead to some astonishing results, much like the microprocessor, transitioning from just enough computational power to run a 4-function calculator then to today's standard computing platform.
(I'm sure you know these things, at least academically. But I wonder whether you are so old as to have experienced these transitions firsthand and therefore "feel" them? To someone like me, the living history of Moore's heuristic has me in a constant state of amazement. When I was 20, a DEC RK05 5 mbyte disk drive cost $6500 plus about $2500 for the controller, attached to a $12000 DEC PDP-8 with 4 kbytes of core memory.)
* A modern quad Opteron or Core2 quad (with supporting stuff like terabyte drives, multigigabyte RAM, gigabit networking etc.) has performance today equivalent to the supercomputer of 20 years ago, maybe more.
Many of these types of nano inventions are being used as military weapons against the human race. Google Morgellons and chemtrails or aerosol attacks.
Somebody's been watching too much X-Files..........................
Arrowhead research (ARWR) is already involved in phase II studies with live subjects (people) for this technology. The targeted delivery of chemotherapy to tumor sites will spare many patients from the ravages of system wide delivery of chemotherapy.
A lot of people are doing this stuff. My bet is that most of it will never see the light of day. Evolution had a couple billion years to figure this out, we have been at it for no more than a century. All the methods under investigation are still very crude and basically shots in the dark.
Ray Kurzweil told us this was going to happen
Four years ago.
Read Fantastic Voyage and The Singularity is Near.
Except that nothing of practical consequence has been achieved here.
"The first frontier for this breakthrough may be oncology where such targeted drug delivery is obvious."
The second? Targeting those cells in the brain that inhibit anti-social behavior and then running the patient for President.
Or has that been done already?
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