Starving Cancer

The current methods for cancer treatment (chemotherapy chief among them) tend to be painful, expensive, and overall almost as damaging to the body as helpful. Millions of dollars each year goes into newer treatments for cancer hoping for a cure, but some researchers in Vancouver have found a treatment for liver cancer that is very promising. They proposed to starve the cancer, thus killing it, by cutting off the blood flow to the tumor. They do this with plastic beads called QuadraSpheres. Synthesized from a sodium acrylate and vinyl alcohol polymer that soaks up drugs and has a time release, the QuadraSpheres are injected into the cancer patient in an artery near the tumor. Then, these beads diffuse down into the capillary beds and block them off, efficiently starving the tumor and keeping the drugs from moving elsewhere in the body where they arent needed. Still in the research phase, these beads could revolutionize cancer treatment.

I found this article extremely interesting because it was a mechanical and relatively simple solution to the extremely confusing and deadly problem that is cancer. Someday I could be designing the next QuadraSphere.

URL: www.popsci.com (article originally found in Popular Science magazine for iPad).