Nanomedicine refers to the medical application of nanotechnology that will hopefully lead to useful research tools, advanced drug delivery systems, and new ways to treat disease and to repair damaged tissue and cells. According to the researchers, single cell targeting is one of the most accepted advantages of nanomedicine.
Remarkably, the researchers at the Rice University have revealed an innovative technique to eradicate individual diseased cells and wipe out them with tiny explosions. For the study the researchers used lasers and nanoparticles to make “nanobubbles”. These nanobubbles are produced when gold nanoparticles are struck by short laser pulses. These nanobubbles are short lived. But they can be made smaller or larger by varying the power of the laser. Interesting fact is that these are visible under a microscope and , nanobubbles can be used to either diagnose sick cells or to track the explosions that are destroying them.
The present study focuses on leukemia cells and cells from head and neck cancers. The team attached antibodies to the nanoparticle so that they would target only the cancer cells, and results shown that the technique was effective at locating and killing the cancer cells. They also found that they could tune the lasers to create either small, bright bubbles that were visible but harmless or large bubbles that burst the cells.
Rice physicist and the lead researcher on the project Dmitri Lapotko, said, “The idea is to spot and treat unhealthy cells early, before a disease progresses to the point of making people extremely ill.” He also explained that the nanobubble technology could be used for “theranostics”. Theranostics refers to a single process that merges diagnosis and therapy. “The mechanical and optical properties of the bubbles offer unique advantages in localizing the biomedical applications to the individual cell level, or perhaps even to work within cells.”, said Jason Hafner, associate professor of physics and astronomy