/ News
Fishing rod reels brain tumour cells to their death
Let's go fishing… for cancer cells. A tiny rod has been developed that reels in brain tumour cells and guides them out of the brain to their death.
Glioblastoma is the most common and aggressive type of adult brain cancer. It is lethal and very difficult to operate on because of the large size and inaccessible location of the tumours.
Rather than engineer ever more toxic drugs to kill glioblastoma cells deep in the brain, Ravi Bellamkonda – based at Emory University School of Medicine and Georgia Institute of Technology, both in Atlanta – and his team wondered if they could move the tumours to a more accessible location.
Glioblastoma cells normally move around the brain by latching on to nerves and blood vessels. To divert their path, Bellamkonda and his team created a polymer rod 6 millimetres long. Inside the rod, they placed a thin film – 10 micrometres thick – that mimics the shape of nerves and blood vessels. The cells seem to like a convex or concave shape, he says, so you don't need any additional chemicals or proteins.
At the top end of the rod is a blob of gel containing a drug that kills glioblastoma cells. The idea is simple: tumour cells mistake the rod for a nerve or blood vessel, travel up it and meet their death at the end. "In a crazy way this is a case where the tumour comes to the drug rather than the drug going to the tumour," says Bellamkonda.
Walking the plank
To test their design, Bellamkonda's team grafted human glioblastoma tumours into rat brains. They then inserted the rod into the tumour, with the gel sitting just above the surface of the skull. After 15 days, the majority of the tumour cells had migrated along the fibre to meet their doom.
"The residual tumour that didn't enter the fibre shrank by almost 90 per cent," says Bellamkonda. "We did a careful analysis to make sure that we weren't just giving another route for the tumour to grow into, but it showed that essentially we displaced the tumour from one location to another."
The technique will not completely rid the patient of cancer, but Bellamkonda suggests that it might be used to move an inoperable tumour to an area closer to the surface of the brain where it can be surgically removed, or it could shrink and maintain tumours at a size at which they do no damage. Because the rods are so thin, they should be able to be inserted into a person's brain without causing disruption.
The team has also tested the technique on isolated breast cancer cells and prostate cancer in the lab. They hope that it could be used to manage many other kinds of slow-growing tumours by giving them a similar fatal path to migrate along.
Journal reference: Nature Materials, DOI: 10.1038/nmat3878
Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25063-fishing-rod-reels-brain-tumour-cells-to-their-death.html
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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