November 2011 – Page 4 – David Bradley

Nanotech drug delivery

According to a report from Cientifica, healthcare will benefit from nanotechnology sooner than many other areas during the next decade. The organisation’s report, Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery 2011, discusses the potential for targeted drug delivery in treating cancer, for instance, and gives a breakdown of the nanotech state of the art in this and other therapeutic areas. The reports suggests that the nanotech market in its entirety will be worth a trillion dollars as soon as 2015.

In an independent review of the field, Mohammed Shuaib Khan and colleagues in the Department of Pharmaceutics, at JSS College of Pharmacy, in Karnataka, India, explain how engineered nanoparticles (NP) (entities smaller than 100 nanometres in diameter) are an increasing focus of research and potential applications, whether nanospheres or nanocapsules. The great potential of nanotechnology in medicine, aside from patent extension on old drugs and the profits longed for in the Cientifica report, are the advantages they bring in terms of getting medicine into the body at the right dose, in the right form and reducing side effects.

Researchers across the globe are working on countless approaches to nanoparticles and nanocapsules based on bottom-up, bottom-down and even lateral approaches to drug delivery systems. Nanoparticles composed of polymers and many other materials are being developed and tested with the emphasis on improved uptake, targeting and side effect reduction, whether small molecules, antigens or gene therapy agents. Delivery of vaccine antigens to gut-associated lymphoid tissues (GALT), controlled release, and reduction of gastrointestinal irritation are high on the agenda, for instance.

“Knowledge of the fundamental relationships would allow NP to be designed with defined size and surface characteristics for delivery to specific cells or organs in body.

Mohammed Shuaib Khan, & D.V. Gowda (2011). Nanoparticles: a boon for modernisation of drug delivery: a review Int. J. Nanoparticles, 4 (4), 389-411

Creative Commons Image courtesy of flickr user pennstatelive

Alternative medicine hazard warning sign – !Rx

I just posted an interview with Edzard Ernst in which he discusses his very serious concerns with the widespread, unthinking acceptance of certain forms of alternative medicine. I used a little bit of pseudo-code, !Rx, which was meant to symbolise the opposite of conventional medicine. If Rx is symbolic of a medical prescription from the Latin verb “recipere” meaning “take thou”, then putting the logical operator, !, in front of it makes it read “NOT Rx”, in other words, “don’t take”. Subtle, huh? Feel free to share and re-use the icon.

The symbol is not actually an R and an x, of course, it’s meant to be an Italic R with a long tale that crosses a subscript x. This will show up properly here – â„ž – only if your browser’s character set is set the same as mine.

Edzard Ernst Q&A on !Rx

The recent death of Apple boss Steve Jobs is putatively yet another example of how dangerous spurious alternative medicine (!Rx) can be. In October 2003, when Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he turned not to real medicine but to acupuncture, macrobiotic diets, and visits to a spiritualist. If he had seen an oncologist sooner, who knows what might have been his chances?

There are still homeopaths around claiming their snake oil and sugar pills can prevent malaria and treat HIV. Yes…I knoooow…the placebo effect is strong, but there are limits.

Meanwhile, in this fascinating interview with Ernst he points out that we really don’t know how big a problem alt meds are:

“Risks of alternative medicine are under-researched and under-reported. We know of some 700 serious complications after chiropractic [damage to neck arteries leading to stroke and death, for instance]. We also know that under-reporting is such that this figure could be larger by one or two orders of magnitude.” — Ernst.

via Q&A: Edzard Ernst on alternative medicine – Health – Macleans.ca.

CSI Chemistry – the crime scene

I recently wrote about how Raman spectroscopy could change the way forensic scientists analyse splashes and stains during a crime scene investigation or a suspect’s clothes and skin. Last year, it was saliva analysis, most recently the research has focused on female bodily fluids associated with the scene of a sexual assault or rape. The work is that of Igor Lednev’s team at University at Albany, SUNY, New York. They have now added near-infrared Raman microspectroscopy and an advanced statistical analysis to the arsenal of techniques available to law enforcement scientists allowing them to quickly and accurately identify traces of vaginal fluid at a crime scene, on suspect clothing or skin.

Team member created several montages to illustrate my article, but obviously there was not space for all of them in the published version, so I am reproducing them here. They’re very, very good.

Sikirzhytskaya, A., Sikirzhytski, V., & Lednev, I. (2011). Raman spectroscopic signature of vaginal fluid and its potential application in forensic body fluid identification Forensic Science International DOI: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2011.08.015

What was that octopus thinking?

No alien invented by a science fiction author is so startlingly strange as the octopus, says Sy Montgomery. Here is a being that even if weighing 100 lbs and more than eight feet long can still squeeze its boneless body through an opening the size of an orange.

This is a creature who can taste and feel through any of the thousands of suckers along its eight arms. An alien with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake. Its tongue is covered with teeth, it can shape-shift with the best of them and go through colour changes to put any camouflaged ET to shame, and it can squirt clouds of black ink like an action hero depositing oil on the road behind to escape the baddies.

But most intriguing of all are the hints that this oceanic alien has great intelligence.

Here’s a fairly old video clip showing an octopus looking and behaving like a peacock flounder fish. Camouflage and swimming mimicry.

via Inside the mind of the octopus | Orion Magazine.