PROJECT TITLE :

Towards Control of Magnetic Fluids in Patients: Directing Therapeutic Nanoparticles to Disease Locations

ABSTRACT:

Atremendous need exists to be able to focus medicine to disease locations. During chemotherapy, for example, typically less than 0.1% of the drugs are taken up by tumor cells, with the remaining 99.9% going into healthy tissue [1]. Chemotherapy encompasses treating patients with a diverse collection of drugs that attempt to preferentially destroy cancer cells either by inhibiting cellular division (which kills fast growing cancers but also bone marrow, hair, skin, gut, and immune system cells) or by interrupting essential cell signaling pathways [2][7]. Physicians often combine drugs into chemotherapy cocktails that can compound side effects, and the dosage is usually selected by how much a patient can physically withstand rather than by how much is needed to kill all the tumor cells [2], [8], [9]. The ability to actively position medicine, to physically direct and focus it to specific locations in the body, would allow better treatment of not only cancer but many other diseases.