November 5th, 2007
How radio waves really can kill cancer
When I first read this I thought it was crazy, but it’s not.
Scientists at Rice University and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston are injecting carbon nanotubes into tumors, then hitting the tumors with radio waves.
Lead scientist Steven Curley of M.D. Anderson (right) has been working on tumors and radio for years, and his early specialty was colon cancer, but this is a far more general technique.
Radio entrepreneur John Kanzius, a leukemia victim, was given credit for pushing Curley. Kanzius actually performed his own tests, inserting minerals into hot dogs and zapping them, before he was put in touch with Curley in 2005. Curley rejected the use of copper, suggesting carbon nanotubes, a major field of study across the street from him, at Rice University.
Ironically Dr. Richard Smalley, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering Buckminsterfullerene, the substance carbon nanotubes are made of, was dieing of cancer at just that time, and was working on applications for his technology in the cancer fight.
At his death he had already found that the tubes emit infrared light while in the body, so they can be identified, and that they are essentially harmless.
Boris Yakobson, the Rice scientist who carried on the work, said he met with Smalley just five days before his death, and all the dieing man wanted to talk about was the physics behind the phenomenon.
In the latest experiment, rabbits were used, but the results seem to apply to humans, and to many forms of cancer. Clinical trials are still three years away, as Curley’s team works to target the nanotubes on living tumors in humans.
The results will be fully described in the December issue of Cancer.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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