Nanotechnology cures cancer!

摘要

Drug molecules not only have to be effective at treating disease, they also have to be robust enough to get from the place where they enter the body to the place where they are designed to act. Given that bodies devote a lot of effort to hunting down and destroying things that are in the wrong place—whether those things be molecules, viruses, bacteria or even errant body cells—designing drugs that can do this is no mean feat. That is doubly true when the drug in question actually acts by stimulating one of these "thing-in-the-wrong-place" mech-anisms-which is precisely how drugs that provoke a phenomenon called RNA interference work. RNAi, as it is known for short, is an approach to pharmacology that might revolutionise the field if it could be made to work routinely. It uses a natural anti-virus mechanism to block the activity of disease-causing genes, so any illness caused by the activity (as opposed to the inactivity) of a particular gene might, in principle, be treated by it.