How to blow cancer cells up from the inside
Microscopic lasers may stop tumors spreading around the body
It is more than 50 years since “Fantastic Voyage” hit the silver screen. The film’s premise, shrinking a submarine and her crew of doctors to the point where they can travel through a patient’s bloodstream to repair damage in situ, though entertaining, remains as absurd as it was in 1966. Not so the idea that therapeutic machines small enough to circulate in this way might be built. Indeed, perhaps inspired by the film, several such efforts have been made. Some are drug-delivery devices. Some are ways of concentrating externally applied energy into tissue that needs to be killed. And they are starting to be approved for clinical use.
The latest attempt, by Vladimir Zharov of the University of Arkansas and Mark Stockman of Georgia State University, in Atlanta, involves injecting cancer patients with hordes of tiny lasers that will seek out and destroy so-called circulating tumour cells (CTCs). These are cells that have broken off a primary tumour and which, if left unchecked, might lodge in various parts of the body and turn into secondary cancers, a process called metastasis.
The minuscule lasers which the pair use, of a type developed a few years ago by Dr Stockman, are called “spasers”. This is short for…
