Choosing the right drug to fight cancer is extremely difficult, and there’s a big price to pay for making the wrong choice. All cancer drugs have side effects—many weaken the body—and time spent taking the wrong drug is time that allows the cancer to grow and spread unchecked. Fortunately, chemical engineers have developed a method to combat this, sending nanoscale-sized particles packed with potential drug options inside patients’ tumors to test out which one will be the most effective, with the least amount of harm.
[quote position="left" is_quote="true"]A nanoparticle allows us to load miniscule amounts of medicine.[/quote]
Created by Avi Schroeder and his team of colleagues at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, this highly technical solution scales up our current system for treating cancer—which essentially boils down to a doctor making an educated guess about which drug might work best—then tests five or 10 drugs at once to find the best option with little to no consequences. To build these tiny trial drugs, Schroeder’s team first creates nanosized particles of each drug they’d like to screen. At 1/1,000th the width of a human hair, there’s no danger that they’ll have any major effect on the body.
“This is only possible when you use nanotechnology. A nanoparticle allows us to load miniscule amounts of medicine,” says Schroeder. But the nanoparticles aren’t useful to anyone when injected into the body all on their own: They are so small, they can’t be detected using any kind of chemical analysis tool that exists, which makes it nearly impossible to measure their impact. So Schroeder’s researchers came up with a novel solution, attaching each different nanoscale-scale drug to a unique strand of DNA. Generated by outside labs that build customized DNA sequences to order, they’re easy for doctors to spot in a genetic lineup and, thus, simple to analyze.
Once this process is complete, the nanoparticles—which are designed with an outer layer that looks like water to the immune system, keeping them from being attacked—are injected into a patient’s bloodstream. Because hungry tumors feed on blood vessels, the nanoparticles quickly and safely end up exactly where they need to go. Over a period of about 24 hours, they start killing (or not killing) cells inside the tumor. The drug that causes the most damage is determined to be the winner.
To track all that microscopic destruction, doctors must take a biopsy of a patient’s tumor about two days after initial injection. The tissue sample is disassembled into individual cells, some of which will be alive and some of which will be dead. Inside the dead cells—which have died because the medicine was effective—researchers locate those unique DNA strands that mark the treatment that killed them. Sometimes, more than one medicine proves effective, which makes the trial run even more useful.
“Let’s say we know a patient will have horrible side effects from one medicine and not the other and we know both will be effective. We can choose a medicine that will be preferable for the quality of life,” says Schroeder.
[quote position="right" is_quote="true"]We can choose a medicine that will be preferable for the quality of life.[/quote]
So far, this system has only been tested in mice, but in February, the technology is set to begin its transition from lab to clinic, where it will undergo trials on humans. Once it’s ready for prime time, Schroeder says the new testing technology will not only help save lives and increase the quality of those lives, but also should save quite a bit of money.
One current system for pretesting drugs, for example, requires growing a patient's tumor inside a mouse model, then giving the drugs to the mice to see if they fight the cancer. This process can cost tens of thousands of dollars (depending on how many drugs are tested) and can take many months. Schroeder estimates that Technion’s system could deliver results to patients within a week at a cost of about $5,000.
Narrowing down the safest and most affordable treatment “is a problem that doesn't have a current solution,” says Schroeder. “We’re really trying to do our best to save the patient and grant them a high quality of life.”
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.