A Nanotech Cure for Cancer?

It’s a space-opera scene we know by heart: The hero’s tiny craft faces off against the vast enemy ship. Now scale down the set a billion times or so, and replace Luke Skywalker’s X-wing and the Death Star with a clump of drug-bearing molecules and a misshapen cancer cell.

This scenario — from a National Cancer Institute video — is just one possibility offered by the burgeoning field of cancer nanotechnology, where miniscule molecules are designed with literally atomic precision to combat a disease that kills half a million Americans every year.

"It’s 21st-century medicine," said Vicki Colvin of Rice University’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. "It sits at the intersection of some of the greatest achievements in many different areas of science, from material science to cell biology to physics and advances in imaging."

By Brandon Keim

Full Story: http://wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,69206,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

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Nanotubes Blast Cancer Cells

Balaji Panchapakesan likes to leave innocuous packages lying around, then detonate them remotely, killing any victims who are near the blast. No, he’s not an Iraqi insurgent — he’s an engineering professor at the University of Delaware, and his bombs are carbon nanotubes. His explosions are on the nanoscale, and his victims are cancer cells. His idea that nanobombs can fight cancer in a cell-by-cell war of attrition has been effective in petri dishes.

At the heart of Panchapakesan’s nanobombs are single-walled carbon nanotubes. While these tiny structures have been heralded as the material of the future for their astounding strength, Panchapakesan is focused on one of their other strange features: When heated by a laser at an 800-nanometer wavelength, they explode.

By Sam Jaffe

Full Story: http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69406,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5