Tough question

[Queso]

So recent studies (Saw in the Hypography news) state that using the resonant frequency of nanotubes you can kill cancer tells, correct?

 

Well...what kind of frequencies are those?

Are they in the Hz range?

[CraigD]

So recent studies (Saw in the Hypography news) state that using the resonant frequency of nanotubes you can kill cancer tells, correct?

That doesn’t describe the whole process discussed in 13239.

 

Before you can use the mentioned radio waves to heat the cancer cells to death, you’ve got to get the mentioned carbon nanotubes close to them – and not close to anything you don’t want to kill, like healthy tissue. Dr Curley’s statement “Targeting the nanotubes solely to cancer cells is the major challenge in advancing the therapy” is, I think, a bit of an understatement. Compared to this challenge - which will require tricks like attaching these little conductive tubules to antibody or other cells that already naturally bind to the cancer cells - heating them with radio waves once they’re there is easy.

 

Well...what kind of frequencies are those?

Are they in the Hz range?

To know that, you’d have to know the length of the nanotubes, and the speed of light within the nanotube (it’s antenna “velocity factor”), then pick some multiple of that for the radio wavelength, avoiding ones that are resonant frequencies for important stuff in the human body, such as water molecules and important proteins, like DNA and RNA. This is essentially antenna design, which can be pretty complicated stuff. At the level of detail of this discussion, I don’t think knowing the exact radio frequencies used is very important.

 

Though this is pretty nifty medical research, it’s still what I’d call “sloppy wet nanotech”. Though arguably more likely to produce successful therapies in the short term, IMHO it’s more valuable in the long run to develop more precise, mechanical, “neat dry” nanotech, like that described in this 2-year-old post, “Nano-headed fibres”, and this one. As with existing “radio frequency ablation” techniques described in the article, where the object heated is a fine needle microsurgically inserted into a tumor, there’s no delivery method more direct than physically sticking something somewhere.

 

Of course, these research MDs are way more knowledgeable in the field than I, so My Humble Opinion on the subject may be humble indeed. Nonetheless, I remain very optimistic about the future of robotic, non-free-floating nanotechnology in medicine.

 

:) PS: Any reason why this thread shouldn’t be moved into the news article thread?