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MAGNETS CAN MAKE ANTI-CANCER DRUG WORK BETTER
By Stacey Lenae Humphreys
Senior in environmental engineering
FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
At the FAMU/ FSU College of Engineering, walk through the doors of the blue and silver engineering building, take the stairs, and steal a glimpse into the mechanical engineering lab, where the latest discoveries in biomedical research are being made.
In one lab, you'll find magnets that double the power of a drug that treats skin cancer.
In 1996, Therakos Inc., a research division of Johnson & Johnson, was looking for an improvement in a treatment process.
The drug used to treat skin cancer, Methoxsalen, is photosensitive, which means that it is activated only by light. That poses a problem: the drug thrives under the light surroundings of white blood cells, but the red blood cells are dark and thus absorb light.
Therefore, the red blood cells must be temporarily removed, allowing the medicine to work its magic under the white blood cells and treat the cancer.
Previously, a centrifuge was hooked up to the patient's blood supply: it would separate and remove the red cells from the white.
That method, however, could remove only half of the red cells from the body, and thus the drug was only 50 percent efficient in its treatment.
Therakos Inc. asked Ching-Jen Chen, dean of the FAMU/FSU Engineering School, and Yousef Haik, a professor of mechanical engineering, to help find ways to improve the treatment's effectiveness. As Chen, Haik and their research team experimented in the labs on the engineering campus, a remarkable discovery was revealed. Magnets were the key that would open many more doors.
Magnets are not just for fun and magic tricks anymore: they are now taking up an important role in the world of medicine.
The red blood cells are a dramatic example.
They have special sugars on their surfaces. Proteins that can link only to those sugars are placed on tiny magnetic spheres, which are even smaller than the cells themselves.
Next, the tiny protein-coated magnetic spheres are introduced into the blood stream, where each sphere will attach to a matching sugar on a red blood cell. As the patient's blood flows through a tube, a magnetic field is held close, attracting all the red blood cells that now also have the charge of the magnet spheres attached to them.
As the field is applied, the magnetic red blood cells cling to the magnetic field and allow the white cells to be easily treated, enabling the medicine to fight the cancer effectively.
Finally, the bond between the magnetic spheres and the red cells is broken by a simple dose of sugar, and the red blood cells are allowed to flow back into the body.
The whole process takes just about an hour, instead of the two days required for the old process, and the best part is that the cancer is treated with 95 percent efficiency. That means that the cancer can be treated extremely effectively, with more comfort and less time needed from the patient, as soon as the Food and Drug Administration approves the procedure.
Now that this research is done, and the idea has been patented, there is still much more work yet to be done.
The breakthrough of the remarkable idea of using magnets is filled with endless possibilities. New projects are already underway at the engineering labs, and according to Dr. Haik, "we are looking to magnets to show us new methods of treating different types of cancer, and to lead us to better ways of regulating insulin for diabetes."