Cooking cancer with a little help from nanotubes

2009 AIP Industrial Physics Forum : Thermal therapy is being used to kill cancer cells in tumors that other methods fail to eliminate, but there is the risk of overheating healthy cells, or not heating the tumor cells enough.A new idea for improving thermal therapy was recently published in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences and presented at the AAPM session " Frontiers in Medical Physics ,” by Leo Xuanfeng Ding from Wake Forest University . Using multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCN’s) Ding and his collaborators hope to make guided laser cancer removal safer and more effective.The treatment injects cancer tumors with MWCN’s, and uses a guided near infrared laser to heat them up and deliver a fatal temperature rise to the cancer cells. The laser pulse is low energy (3 W/cm2) and fast (30 seconds per dose). The team uses Magnetic Resonance Temperature Imaging, MRTI, to identify the tumor and then to monitor the tumor’s temperature as well as the temperature of the surrounding tissue. Trials with mice showed a significant rise in the temperature of the cancer cells injected with the MWCN’s, compared to without. And, the tumors were far less likely to come back.