JOR 221 Project 3
Multi-Media Reporting
Fighting Cancer in Little Ways
By Kelsey Maloney
KINGSTON – The Rhode Island Consortium for Nano-science and Nanotechnology was established in 2010 by Congress, which conjoined the University of Rhode Island and Brown University to perform research on this developing science. In an interview with Rachel Simon, a first year graduate student in electrical engineering at URI, she explains her work with nano-medicine and her research into the use of nano-particles to treat cancer.
“One of the huge problems with currently existing cancer treatments is that they’ve been working at the wrong scale,” said Simon. “For example, with radiation, you have to expose healthy tissue as well as the tumor you’re trying to kill. However, nanotechnology lets us get down to the actual cellular level to possibly only kill the tumor.”
Simon and her student group have been working with data developed by faculty, which shows that cancer cells are absorbing these nano-particles successfully. Through their research so far, what has been shown is that by using grown cancer cells in the lab, then applying these nano-particles to them, the nano-particles can successfully pierce through the cell. Today, they have moved onto trying to figure out how to deliver this new treatment in the human body.
“So in real life, we have to be able to inject this into the bloodstream and make sure that the nano-particles will work well in human blood,” said Simon. “We’ve started off by taking these nano-particles and breaking down human blood, which can be very complex because human blood has a number of components.”
Simon explained how they are going through this process step by step. First, they have tried seeing how nano-particles interact with the salts dissolved in blood and the next step was protein, and so on. They will go through this process with every component in human blood.
Photo credit by Kelsey Maloney
Simon and her group are using a number of nanotechnology instruments and tools to perform these tasks. One of them being a tool called Dynamic Light Scattering, which is a way of estimating the size of nano-particles. Another tool is called the Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM), which allows them to visualize the nano-particles.
“The TEM is a very impressive tool considering that these nano-particles are about a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair,” said Simon.