Options to making smarter medicine
Nanoparticles could lead to targeted treatment for cancerous tumors reducing side effects
The seeds of mutiny reside in every one of our bodies. To counter these potential uprisings, microscopic soldiers are being designed at Clemson to fight on our behalf.
We have been waging a war on cancer since President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act in 1971. Despite the four decades and billions of dollars directed at finding a cure, cancer still claimed the lives of 1.6 million people in the U.S. alone
last year.
As head of Clemsons Nanomedicine Laboratory, Dr. Frank Alexis seeks to provide better cancer treatment options to patients.
[Our medicine] works, but in many cases we dont completely know why, Dr. Alexis said. As a result, cancer therapies are not optimized to maximize the patients outcome. Some even exhibit unintended side effects that can harm the patient.
His students, both graduate and undergraduate, specialize in building materials on a very small scale. The main workhorses in Dr. Alexis lab are nanoparticles, or small spheres composed of molecular building blocks. These can be loaded with drugs that kill cancer cells.
To protect the fields growing reputation, Dr. Alexis advocates an attitude that stresses the importance of first learning the basics. In this way, he plans to make treatments better, but not necessarily more sophisticated, Dr. Alexis said.
In contrast to the labs simple approach for optimizing medical treatments, their major target is an extremely complex disease.
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Options to making smarter medicine