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Scientists have killed kidney tumours in nearly 80 percent of mice by injecting nanotubes into tumours and zapping them with a quick, 30-second laser burst. This successful experiment suggests a potential future cancer treatment for humans.
The result was a combined effort of Wake Forest University School of Medicine (WFUSM), Rice University and Virginia Tech.
The lead study investigator and professor of biochemistry at Wake Forest, Suzy Torti, said "When dealing with cancer, survival is the endpoint you are searching for."
"It's great if you can get the tumour to shrink, but the gold standard is to make the tumour shrink or disappear and not come back. It appears that we've found a way to do that," said Torti.
Nanotubes are long, thin, sub-microscopic tubes made of carbon. For the study, researchers used multi-walled nanotubes (MWCNTs), which contain several nanotubes nestled within each other.
The tubes respond by vibrating and creating heat when exposed non-invasively to laser-generated near-infrared radiation. The tumour cells near the tubes begin to shrink and die when enough heat is generated.
Using a mouse model, researchers injected kidney tumours with different quantities of MWCNTs and exposed the area to a three-watt laser for 30 seconds.
Researchers found that the mice who received no treatment for their tumours died in about 30 days into the study.
Mice who received the nanotubes alone or laser treatment alone survived for a similar length of time. However, the group that received the highest dose of such nanotubes, the tumours completely disappeared in 80 percent of the mice.
Many of those mice continued to live tumour-free through the completion of the study, which was about nine months later.
"You can actually watch the tumours shrinking until, one day, they are gone," Torti said.
Studies need to be done to test the toxicity and safety, before the treatment can be implemented in humans .It is also important to know if the treatment causes any changes in organs over time, as well as the pharmacology of the treatment, looking at things such as what happens to the nanotubes, which are synthetic materials, over time.
The study was published in the August issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
