MIT triumph-Immune cells with backpacks, guided medication

Apparently someone’s using their brain, somewhere. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken the whole idea of targeting to a universal level. While they were at it, they came up with a really workable looking way of moving the cells around.

Problems with targeting won’t be news to most scientists, or anyone who’s been following the laborious stagger of medicine up a very steep cliff of knowledge. The magic bullet has until now been a pretty inaccurate thing, better in some cases, but hardly at sniper level. MIT:

MIT engineers have outfitted cells with tiny "backpacks" that could allow them to deliver chemotherapy agents, diagnose tumors or become building blocks for tissue engineering.

This “tissue engineering” thing is another issue that’s been getting on people’s nerves for a while. Cells will grow onto structures, but delivering those structures, as you can imagine, isn’t the sort of thing you want to get wrong. Nor are there prizes for putting them in the wrong place.

The polymer backpacks allow researchers to use cells to ferry tiny cargoes and manipulate their movements using magnetic fields. Since each patch covers only a small portion of the cell surface, it does not interfere with the cell's normal functions or prevent it from interacting with the external environment.

"The goal is to perturb the cell as little as possible," said Robert Cohen, the St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and an author of the paper.

Using magnetic fields, by the way, is another very important, Don’t Stress The Patient, approach, and allows for some accuracy, rather than the assumption of chemical bonds and delivery through various natural mechanisms. In terms of saving the incredible amounts of time and effort involved in many forms of therapy, it’s pretty damn impressive economically, too. This is one of the holy grails of targeting, and sick people really don’t need long periods of waiting and wondering. Nor do doctors, who may have to move to other treatments in a hurry. Doing diagnostic work is also a bit out of the ordinary, according to the last few thousand years of medicine.

Cellular backpacks carrying chemotherapy agents could target tumor cells, while cells equipped with patches carrying imaging agents could help identify tumors by binding to protein markers expressed by cancer cells.

This is at cellular level, not massive clinical pathology level. Again, the economics have just been improved dramatically. So has the accuracy. The possible applications for people in early diagnosis, remission, and recovery are endless, and all useful. Sufferers and their families will recognize how truly useful a direct diagnosis tool is. In what is probably yet another first, this is at the very least one of the first practical working applications of nano technology in medicine. Just shows how useful this technology will be, and how rapidly it’s advancing. MIT is one of the world's treasures. If you want to restart the US economy, you could have an MIT-led recovery, just on the things we've covered in the last year or so on DJ. The solar energy story I did a few months ago remains one of my all time favorites. Assuming we have at least for the time being got the fig leaves out of the science budgets, these things are worth trillions. Wake up, America, and look what you've got.