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NANOTECHNOLOGY; A MAGIC BULLET TO CURE CANCER
. Cancer has been the great killer of our time. While the advance of medical science has made many cancers treatable, the diagnosis of cancer can still often mean a death sentence. But thanks to a new science known as nanotechnology
During a visit to the doctor, you get the bad news. Various tests that have been performed on you have uncovered the fact that you have a cancer. It is a very aggressive, malignant form of cancer. The doctor gives you your options, which include surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. He gives you your chances of survival, which are not good. Nevertheless, you submit to a treatment regime, which involves side effects such as nausea and pain. The progress of your cancer is slowed, but not stopped. Within a few short months of agony and rapidly deteriorating heath, you are dead. Now imagine another visit to the doctor. He gives you the same bad news. However, he is able to give you an injection right there in the office. During a follow up visit about two weeks later, tests indicate that your cancer has been totally eradicated. You have many years of happy, productive life ahead of you. How is the second scenario possible?
The answer lays in a new science known as nanotechnology.
What is Nanotechnology?
The technology involving the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules to build structures with atomic specifications is called as nano technology.
Nano technology is still at its infant stages, but the nano products are having far reaching uses NANO MATERIALS : Materials having very very small size crystallites in the range of 1-100 nanometers (nm) are defined as nano materials .
• ARE NANO MATERIALS AVAILABLE IN NATURE?
Nanomaterials can be natural or man made. For example, some nano particles are produced naturally by plants or even by volcanic activity.
They have also been created for thousands of years as the by products of cooking, burning and more recently from vehicle exhausts.
Nanotechnology And Cancer ;
Most animal cells are about ten thousand to twenty thousand nanometers in diameter. Therefore, it would be easy for nanodevices to enter and interact with the cells DNA and proteins.
Nanotechnology can be used to fight cancer in two ways. First, it will be used in detecting the presence of cancer far earlier and with greater precision than with standard diagnostic methods, such as x-rays, MRIs, and biopsies.
Second, it will be used in the destruction of the cancer, with greater precision and thoroughness, once it is detected.
Detecting Cancer
It is practically a cliché in medicine that early detection of cancer translates into a greater probability of treating the cancer successfully. There are several nanotechnology tools being developed that could detect cancer when it is still at the molecular level. Some nanodevices are being developed that could detect alterations of a cell’s DNA that is a precursor to the development of cancer tumors. Other nanodevices are being developed that would have the capability to bind to cancer cells and not normal cells, thus making detection easier. Still other nanodevices could detect cancer “biomarkers” in a sample of human blood far earlier than current tests allow. The advantages of these methods are that they can detect cancer early, without exploratory surgery, and without physically altering the cells being examined.
Curing Cancer
Nanotechnology’s greatest promise in medicine is its potential to destroy cancers that until now have been resistant to conventional treatments.
Modern chemotherapy and radiation can be best described as carpet bombing cancer. That means that healthy cells are attacked along with the cancer cells. The result is that the patient suffers serious side effects, including nausea, hair loss, anemia, and the degradation of his or her immune system. The lack of precision inherent in modern cancer fighting techniques sometimes means that not all of a cancer is eradicated, resulting in a resurgence of the cancer.
Nanotechnology provides the potential of a cancer fighting smart bomb. Nanodevices can be built that can precisely deliver drugs to the cancer cells, leaving healthy cells untouched. These devices would enter the previously detected cancer cells and deliver the drug or combination of drugs, destroying the cancer from within.
Another potential technique combines nanotechnology with a new form of radiation therapy. Carbon nanotubes are introduced into cancer cells. Then an infrared laser is focused on the affected area. The laser heats the nanotubes, causing the destruction of the cancer cells, leaving healthy cells untouched. BY NANO COMPUTERS
Another technique imagined for treating cancer would involve nanocomputers literally rewriting the DNA of cancer cells to turn them back into normal cells. The idea would be that these devices would examine the DNA of cancer cells on the atomic level, comparing them to what the DNA of normal cells for the patient should be, and then calling in nanorepair devices to fix the DNA.
Drug Administration take a great deal of time to approve new drugs and medical techniques for clinical use.
Nevertheless, some nanotechnology therapies are already available. Liposomes, a first generation nanotechnology device, is being used to deliver drugs to treat certain kinds of fungal infections as well as some kinds of cancer. A team at MIT have managed to successfully kill cancer tumors in mice using a nanodevice delivered drug. Another team at Stanford has used carbon nanotubes to heat and destroy cancer cells.
In 2001, the National Cancer Institute suggested that nanodevices that could detect cancers could be available in “five to fifteen years” and that similar devices that could treat cancers would be available in about the same time frame. Devices that can both detect and treat cancers could be available in “fifteen to twenty years.”
That means that within the lifetimes of most people, cancer, that great killer of our time, may no longer be fraught with the horrors we view it with now. Our descendents might well view cancer as we view certain plagues of the past, like small pox, as part of history and no longer as part of everyday life.
ANOTHER METHOD FOR CURING CANCER -USING NANOROBOTS, nanorobots are perfect for eradicating malignant cells. Scientists are already hard at work on nanobots that can identify and destroy cancer at its growth site so that no trauma is inflicted anywhere else in the body.
The burgeoning field of nanotechnology has many useful and direct applications for the medical industry, and nanorobots are no exception to this rule. The medical science wants to create nanobots that can repair damaged tissue without pain and trauma.
Many of the medical procedures we employ today are very traumatic to the human body and do not work in harmony with our natural systems.
Chemotherapy wreaks havoc on humans and nearly kills them in the quest to kill off their malignant cancer cells.
Invasive surgical procedures are also quite common today, with associated traumas that cause many patients to die on the operating table rather than survive and heal.
Nanorobots are so small that they actually interact on the same level as bacteria and viruses do, and so they are capable of building with the very particles of our bodies: atoms and molecules.
The ideal nanobot has not yet been fully realized, but when this microscopic robot makes its inevitable debut it will be hailed as a lifesaver by the world of medicine.
Some might say that today’s medical advances are more than enough and that mankind should leave room for natural processes. The fact of the matter is that artificial lifestyles have given rise to all kinds of ailments that absolutely require human interference for lifesaving purposes.
Surgery’s attendant risks are not only inherent in the cutting and sewing done by medical staff but include drug-related dangers as well. Patients may be allergic to anesthetics; their organs may become infected from a variety of surgery-related sources; during an organ transplant their body may mysteriously reject the new organ, leading to death; and in the case of a tumor operation, even a few microscopic missed cells can constitute complete failure to battle the cancer.
Simply put, surgeons are people—and people are far too large and clumsy to perform the types of fine-scale operations necessary for fixing the human body.
Drugs are little better when it comes to finesse. Although they do have the ability to interact specifically with the body’s molecules and cells, they operate by way of the circulatory system. Your bloodstream is an indiscriminate cycle that delivers its contents to many parts of the body.
Any drug administered will automatically affect areas of the body that are perfectly healthy, and significant doses will most likely cause unpleasant side effects. This means that the drug which is supposed to cure you may actually leave many parts of your body in worse shape than they were before. In this sense they have much the same blunt effect as a surgeon’s scalpel, no matter how refined the drug.
Nanorobots, on the other hand, will typically measure only about six atoms wide. It is anticipated that they could be equipped with all sorts of tools and cameras in order to furnish more extensive information about the human body. Not only that, but researchers expect that someday they will have refined the nanobot design to the point where nanobots can be remotely controlled in order to perform millions of useful tasks.
Among these is the ability to float neutrally through your bloodstream, identifying problem areas of your body and fixing them. Nanorobots could be used to clear built-up cholesterol from your arteries, thereby saving you from a heart attack. If the heart itself is damaged, they work their way up to the affected area and perform micro-surgery that you would probably not feel or notice, but which would almost certainly save your life.