April 05, 2012

Shrinking Human Tumors via Programmable Nanomedicine Cancer Treatment

Her's a very interesting article written by Katherine Harmon in The Scientific American:

Chemotherapy treatment for cancer is a nasty process. Doctors must try to give patients just enough of the toxic drugs to kill off cancer cells without doing too much harm to the rest of the body’s healthy tissues, a balancing act that, even if successful, can nevertheless cause horrible side effects.

But what if you could program the harsh medicine to go only to the cancerous cells, sparing the rest of the body? Researchers have been aiming for this goal for more than 100 years and have achieved some success in targeted treatment by using monoclonal antibodies in immunotherapy. Getting chemotherapy to cancer cells, however, has proved difficult. A new nanotechnology might just finally bring it into reach.

Scientists have spent the past few decades tinkering with nanopaticles, and recently they have been able to cover them with cancer-seeking proteins and load them with a tumor-busting drug. But these tiny particles, hundreds of which could fit across the width of a human hair, have so far failed to perform in humans.

A new tumor-targeting, nanoparticle-based compound called BIND-014 is now in clinical trials in people, after showing promise in both mice and monkeys. Although this first trial is small, with only 17 patients, and still ongoing, researchers are reporting some positive results, and no obvious major safety setbacks, according to a paper published online April 4 in Science Translational Medicine.

The researchers could move quickly from animals to human studies because they relied on components that have already been used in humans. Specifically, they loaded the nanoparticles with the chemo drug docetaxel, which used to treat solid tumors in many parts of the body, including breast, head, lung, neck, prostate and stomach. They then outfitted the particles with a well-known tumor-specific antigen that targets newly forming blood vessels that develop to feed tumors and that’s also present in prostate cancer cells.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ENTRY ON Programmable Nanomedicine Cancer Treatment Shrinks Human Tumors

April 01, 2012

Hitler and the Argentinian Connection

British journalist Gerrard Williams has told Sky News he and co-author Simon Dunstan found an "overwhelming amount of evidence" to suggest Hitler died an old man in South America. They are of the opinion that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler did not kill himself in Berlin in 1945 but ended his days in Argentina, a new book has claimed.

Whilst many historians say the Nazi leader died in his Berlin bunker in 1945, Williams claims their research, looking at newly de-classified documents and forensic tests, challenges this.

CLICK HERE TO READ Book Claims Hitler 'Died In Argentina'


CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO GERARD WILLIAMS AND HIS EXPLANATIONS AS GIVEN TO  RED ICE RADIO.