UK DEVELOP NEW TECHNIQUE FOR CANCER TREATMENT

 

For: Mains

Topics covered:

• New and more effective cancer treatment techniques.
• Light-based or Photo-dynamic theory.
• Carbon dots.

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News Flash

Researchers at the University of Sheffield in Britain recently developed a new technique that could make light-based cancer treatment more effective and safer for patients while reducing its cost.

 

Light-based or Photo-dynamic theory

The theory is already a clinically-approved treatment, which uses drugs that only work when exposed to light to destroy cancer cells.

However, many of these drugs are frequently toxic even without light, causing many side effects in patients and leading to treatment failure.

 

Highlights

• Researchers have developed tiny carbon nanoparticles that can deliver cancer drugs to tumours.
• The researchers have sought to improve these drugs by using small carbon dots as a way to get the drug to the tumour.

 

Carbon dots

• Carbon dots are fluorescent nanoparticles with very little toxicity.
• Two different versions of the carbon dots were developed as part of the research, one with the drug bound on the surface and the other where the drug was inside the dot.
• When the drug was bound to the surface of a carbon dot it was four times less toxic without light while maintaining its cancer-killing effect in a lab model of melanoma skin cancer.
• The other advantage of the carbon dots is that they glow, also known as fluorescence, which makes them very simple to locate.

 

Way ahead

Research has the potential to produce cheaper anti-cancer drugs with greater efficiency to kill tumours and less side-effects in patients.

 

Source: News on Air

 

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