Nanoparticles constructed to carry a therapeutic payload are studded with proteins that act as keys for gaining entry to tumor cells.
Image: Jessica Weisman
In Brief
- A “systems” approach to medicine views the body as a complex network of molecular interactions that can be measured and modeled, revealing causes of disease such as cancer.
- Extremely miniaturized tools can inexpensively measure and manipulate molecules for systems medicine.
- Nanoscale therapies deliver precisely targeted treatments to tumors while avoiding healthy tissues.
Before going to the gym for a workout or after indulging in cake at the office party, people with diabetes can use a portable monitor to take a quick blood glucose measurement and adjust their food or insulin intake to prevent extreme dips or spikes in blood sugar. The inexpensive finger-prick testing devices that allow diabetics to check their glucose levels throughout the day may sound like small conveniences. That is unless you are diabetic and can remember back a decade or more, when having that disease came with far more fear and guessing and far less control over your own well-being.
The quality of life afforded to diabetics by technologies that easily and inexpensively extract information from the body offers a glimpse of what all medicine could be like: more predictive and preventive, more personalized to the individual's needs and enabling more participation in maintaining one's own health. In fact, we believe that medicine is already headed in that direction, largely because of new technologies that make it possible to acquire and analyze biological information quickly and cheaply.
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2 Comments
Add CommentThe second sentence of this article states: 'This inexpensive finger pricking test device...' While the machine itself may be inexpensive, often times free, it is the test strips that are brutally expensive. Take it from a Diabetes vet, a dollar a test is hardly inexpensive when youre testing 4-6 times a day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn "Nanomedicine Targets Cancer," Heath, Davis, and Hood hold out the "promise" of being able to measure "hundreds of thousands" of proteins at one time. I am not sure whether this is a promise or a curse. The main problem is not the cost per test, which the authors focus on, but rather the cost of the large number of false positive findings that will inevitably be made. No test yet devised is 100% accurate. If we assume that there is a 1% false positive rate (which is extremely low in comparison to most tests used in medicine), then a perfectly healthy individual has a 1% chance that one test will be abnormal by chance. If 100 tests are done, the probability that at least one test will be abnormal jumps to 63%, and it reaches 99.99% with "only" 1,000 tests. Consequently, virtually everyone tested will be shown to have some abnormality that must be followed up with other, perhaps invasive and expensive, tests. It also ignores the fact that, unless effective treatments exist, people will seem to live longer with the disease. This will be an illusory gain, as we have seen with many other screening programs -- the people will live longer with the knowledge that they are ill, but they will still die at the same age. In screening, the technology is the most tractable of the issues; the consequences of the findings are the difficult part.
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