"Biomedical Breakthroughs"

Funded by the National Instisutes of Heath, Dr Jian Yang has discovered a breakthrough fluorescent material that has potential to aid in cancer treatment and management. This polymer created from “naturally occurring building blocks” like many amino acids, citric acid, and octanediol. This material, non toxic and biodegradable also had a natural florescence. These qualities give it many functions some of which could include use for temporary implant material, and its fluorescence rises use for detection and tracking. It also has potential to be fundamental to transport drugs to cancerous cells as a fluorescent coating to track drug delivery enabling the entire process of drug delivery to be monitored. It could also potentially help a growing concern of cancer cell removal, as smaller areas can be overlooked and left behind, but with tracking system could help eliminate that. The first polymer of its kind, has many uses paired with medical imaging systems ans help with cancer detection. This innovative idea bypasses and complications and toxins that accompany other diagnostics or dyes for cancer detection and declared by Dr. Yang a “revolution in biomaterials science”.

This article personally interests me, as oncology is becoming an ever increasing area of research and innovation in biomedical engineering. These small breakthroughs in a simple polymer is a step to an easier diagnostic method and drug delivery method. The range of need varies so greatly in all that is cancer, and seeing a small step through development of a new material increases the reality that small innovations through biomedical engineering rise to steps forward in treating cancer. The new idea of naturally occurring florescence is intriguing, and this new idea could have multiple uses in future detection and drug delivery. This polymer also holds other merits, the polymer is non toxic and biodegradable and is absorbed when the body no longer needs it making a more efficient drug delivery mechanism. While cancer seems often to be a frustrating, unsolvable problem, small breakthroughs like this remind us that each innovation uses biomedical science to utilize discoveries to improve cancer treatment.Kate VincentLink :http://www.uta.edu/ucomm/researchmagazine/2010/cancer/biomedical-breakthroughs.php