A major strategy of modern cancer research is to discover a difference between cancerous and healthy cells and then to specifically target this difference to kill cancer cells without harming healthy tissue. A University of Colorado Cancer Center study (“Thermal ablative therapy with novel gold nanorods in an orthotopic model of urinary bladder cancer”) presented yesterday at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2014 demonstrates a novel strategy that accomplishes both: bladder cancer cells overexpress the protein EGFR; gold nanorods can be engineered to attach to EGFR proteins; and then the application of low-intensity laser to the tissue can preferentially heat these gold nanorods, killing the EGFR-rich cancer cells to which they are attached.
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