Drug delivery by magnetic nano particles...!!!

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If the drug we take to cure any illness reaches the affected part of the body efficiently, then that particular drug will have its optimum effect towards curing the illness.This is kind of common sense..... The main drawbacks of current drug delivery methods are

• many drugs’ potencies and therapeutic effects are limited or otherwise reduced because of the partial degradation that occurs before they reach a desired target in the body.
• Once ingested, time-release medications deliver treatment continuously, rather than providing relief of symptoms and protection from adverse events solely when necessary

Now the researchers from Lund University in Sweden have made a successful attempt in the drug delivery method. Which can be revolutionary if properly developed.They have developed magnetic nanoparticles that can be directed to metallic implants such as artificial knee joints, hip joints and stents in the coronary arteries.

A stent is a tiny tube placed into an artery, blood vessel, or other duct (such as one that carries urine) to hold the structure open.As usual this method is too has problems.depending on the type of stent inserted, the cells of the artery wall can grow and again obstruct the artery or a blood clot can develop in the stent.

To deal with such problems what researchers have now figured out is as below...
The nanoparticles were coated with a drug used to treat blood clots.(The particles could also carry other drugs, e.g. drugs to stop the cell growth that makes an artery become narrower.) When the stent is placed in a magnetic field, the magnetic force becomes sufficiently strong to attract the magnetic nanoparticles.Thus these magnetic nanoparticles carrying drugs will be directed exactly to the affected part of the body and hence cure the problem that is to be cured.

Associate Professor Maria Kempe, her brother and colleague Dr Henrik Kempe and members of staff at Skåne University Hospital have shown that the principle works in animal experiments.They were even successful in dissolving a blood clot in a stent in the heart of an animal.

"They could also carry antibiotics to treat an infection developed after insertion of an implant. We have developed polymer materials that can be loaded with antibiotics -- these could produce interesting results in this context," says Maria Kempe."It takes many years to develop a treatment method that can be used on patients. But the good initial results make us hopeful,"

Again one problem with this method is...For the method to work the patient therefore has to have an implant containing a magnetic metal.

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.