Mostafa A. El-Sayed

Abstract:

Cancer claims the lives many people after several years of suffering and after unsuccessfully using a great deal of different treatments, like surgery, chemical and/or radiation treatments. The field of nanotechnology showed us how different materials acquire so many different properties when their size is reduced to the nanometer scale. Gold nanoparticles having rod shape of nanometer size and a length/width ratio of 3:1 can absorb near infrared light (to which our body is transparent) and convert it into heat. If solution containing gold nanorods is injected into a cancer lump and exposed to near infrared light the hot solution (resulting from the gold nanorods upon absorbing the near infra-red light) melts the cancer cells leading to their death. This was demonstrated by our group in the photo-thermal destruction and destroying cancer cells in solution, in cancer lumps in small and in large animals. [1-4] Normally, some of the cancer cells that do not die are able to migrate to other parts of the body, away from the location of their initial formation spot, until they are located in a sensitive part of the body that leads to cancer patient death. This process in which cancer cells migrate is called metastasis. Very recently, however, we discovered [5] that in our photo-thermal treatment, while treating cancer cells in the first cancer location with hot gold nano-rods, the cancer cell's legs and arms and the motion proteins are photo-thermally destroyed. This makes it difficult for the cancer cells to migrate to new and more important functional locations in the body. This treatment is thus effective in stopping cancer cell migration through the patient body and increases the success rate of the patient recovery.