Monday, August 16, 2010

Smugglig drugs within the body...!!!

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Can you believe if I say, according to a study cancer patients are increasing at a rate of 10000 patients per year...?? Its true.... also according to WHO cancer rates could increase by 50% to 15million by 2020...!!

Let me just tell you what cancer is. Cancer is a type of disease in which cells show uncontrolled growth ,intrusion on and destruction of adjacent tissues and sometimes they pouches (yellow) to the surfaces of cells.

spread to other locations in
the body via lymph or blood.Cancer is caused due to the abnormalities in the genetic material of the transformed cells.In other words, its like everybody has cancerous cells in their body.They start to show malignant properties mentioned above when they are triggered and this triggering process is caused due to carcinogens such as tobacco smoke,radiation,chemicals etc.


Vastly used cancer treatment used nowadays is chemotherapy (which is is the treatment of a disease by chemicals by killing cancerous cells) and Immune-cell therapy.Unfortunately it has a major drawback, it has a major drawback, it causes side effects such as constipation,delirium,fatigue,nausea and vomiting,insomnia etc are very common.A heart,kidney or liver damage is also a real possibility in chemotherapy.

Now let me tell you a good news as well.... researchers from MIT have found a way to overcome the drawbacks in chemotherapy....!!!!!! The new way is to deliver the necessary drugs by smuggling them on the backs of the cells sent in to fight the tumor.In this way drugs can accurately hit the cancerous cells only, greatly reducing the risk of a side effect.

In immune cell therapy, doctors remove a type of immune cells called T cells from the patient, engineer them to target the tumor, and inject them back into the patient. Those T cells then hunt down and destroy tumor cells.What researchers are trying to do is, they have designed drug-carrying pouches made of fatty membranes that can be attached to sulfur-containing molecules normally found on the T-cell surface, in order to avoid the nasty side effects.
In the Nature Medicine study, the researchers injected T cells, each carrying about 100 pouches loaded with the interleukins IL-15 and IL-21, into mice with lung and bone marrow tumors. Once the cells reached the tumors, the pouches gradually degraded and released the drug over a weeklong period. The drug molecules attached themselves to receptors on the surface of the same cells that carried them, stimulating them to grow and divide.

Within 16 days, all of the tumors in the mice treated with T cells carrying the drugs disappeared. Those mice survived until the end of the 100-day experiment, while mice that received no treatment died within 25 days, and mice that received either T cells alone or T cells with injections of interleukins died within 75 days.

The above experiment clearly demonstrate the efficiency of this new method. Darrell Irvine is the senior author of a paper describing the technique in the Aug. 15 issue of Nature Medicine. So lets hope this puts an end to the cancer and to the suffering of those patients who go through a hell of miseries because of the side effects.





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