Mar. 15, 2006 Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology
and the University of California, San Francisco, have found an
even more effective and safer way to detect and kill cancer
cells. By changing the shapes of gold nanospheres into
cylindrical gold nanorods, they can detect malignant tumors
hidden deeper under the skin, like breast cancer, and
selectively destroy them with lasers only half as powerful as
before – without harming the healthy cells. The method, which
allows for a safer, deeper penetrating noninvasive cancer
treatment, has just appeared in the Journal of the American
Chemical Society, volume 128. Last year, the father and son
research team of Mostafa El-Sayed and Ivan El-Sayed, showed that
gold nanoparticles coated with a cancer antibody were very
effective at binding to tumor cells. When bound to the gold, the
cancer cells scattered light, making it very easy to identify
the noncancerous cells from the malignant ones. The
nanoparticles also absorbed the laser light more easily, so th