Brain cancer is a classic double whammy: the extremely invasive form of cancer is both deadly and difficult to treat. Fortunately, there's a promising solution on the table: tumor painting.
Because brain cancer tends to invade surrounding healthy brain tissue, it blurs the line between tumor and non-tumor tissue, and makes it difficult for surgeons to circumvent the healthy parts of the brain when they saw away at the tumor. On top of that, current imaging techniques produce fairly imprecise representations of the tissue, which only compounds the problem.
But now, researchers at the University of Washington have found that they can illuminate mouse brain tumors (and thus distinguish them from surrounding tissue in MRIs and optical imaging) by injecting fluorescent nanoparticles into the rodents' bloodstream. To reach the tumor, the nanoparticles have to traverse the blood-brain barrier, an almost impervious gate that protects the brain from infection. To date, no other nanoparticles had been able to make the difficult crossing.In the future, brain tumor painting could make for more precise brain surgery in humans, and could potentially also lead to earlier cancer detection by means of locating smaller tumors.
[Via ScienceDaily]
Stay up to date on the latest news of the future of science and technology from your iPhone with full articles, images and offline viewing
Featuring every article from the magazine and website, plus links from around the Web. Also see our PopSci DIY feed
Share links with friends, comment on stories and more
In our December issue, Popular Science names the 100 best innovations of the year: bombproof wallpaper, self-parking cars, the fastest helicopter, and 97 more. Plus inventor profiles and videos.
Check out the best of what's new here.