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SuperDots Are Here To Spy on Your Innerspace

New nanoscale sensing promises cancer treatments without the gambling.

Here's your uncomfortable thought for the day: many cancer treatments are a total gamble (and nearly all are a sometimes-gamble). Some treatment approaches can even scrape 10 percent success rates, making them total Hail Marys at best. This means that the vast majority of those patients won't get better, and also that insurance companies are less likely to take the financial risk of the treatments, some of which can run up to a million dollars for a round of therapy. (Interestingly, most patients are still willing to take the gamble of 10 percent success rates rather than deal with much more successful yet arduous treatments like chemotherapy.)

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It can take a while for doctors and patients to even know if that million dollar treatment is working or not. Is the cancer still growing? Well, we won't really know until it's grown enough to detect, so in the meantime we'll keep administering the treatment that may or may not be working and after a while, check on your progress. Have fun living in terror. In the meantime, if the patient is in that 90 percent that won't see results, the tumors are still having a good old time. It's a frustrating situation financially and, of course, terrifying to think of that time wasting.

So, what if we could just park by a patient's cancer cells all Innerspace-style and watch the treatment show happen in real-time, rather than waiting and testing (and more waiting and testing)? This would save a tremendous amount of pain and money because doctors would know immediately what effect the treatment is having on cancer cells as their it's being administered. Well, this day is coming close thanks to a new sensing technology that promises to do roughly just that, allowing real-time nanoscale viewing of junk happening in your body, good or bad. New research describing the technique is out in today's issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

Watching a drug interact with cells in real-time in itself isn't a new technology. We've developed some really great microscopes over the years and we can pretty much spy on a single photon in the right circumstances. But those right circumstances aren't exactly your living tissue in its native environment (your body, hopefully). "Up until now, measuring a single nanoparticle would have required placing it inside a very bulky and expensive microscope," says the University of Adelaide's Prof. Tanya Monro.

"For the first time, we've been able to detect a single nanoparticle at one end of an optical fibre from the other end," she continues. "That opens up all sorts of possibilities in sensing. Using optical fibres we can get to many places such as inside the living human brain, next to a developing embryo, or within an artery‒locations that are inaccessible to conventional measurement tools."

The potential resolution with this technology, called SuperDots™, is up to a thousand times that of anything we currently have going. What's more, the technology is already being raced into cancer diagnostic kits. So: coming to an oncology office near you as soon as one to three years.

@everydayelk