A father and son research team has struck gold for the second time in an attempt to detect and kill cancer cells using lasers, gold nanoparticles, and the binding properties of cells. Last year, Mostafa El-Sayed at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA) and Ivan El-Sayed at the University of California-San Francisco demonstrated that gold nanospheres coated with a cancer antibody were very effective at binding to tumor cells. When bound to the gold, the cancer cells scattered light, allowing the researchers to distinguish the benign cells from the malignant ones. Because the nanoparticles absorbed the laser light more easily, only the coated malignant cells were destroyed while the healthy cells were spared.
展开▼
