Solution in Integration

The TechTalk that got me thinking that in integration lie the solutions of many medical problems. Few precedents are cited below.

1. MIT radar technology fights breast cancer.
2. Preset patterns discovered in neuronal stem cells could complicate therapy.
3. Remote-control nanoparticles deliver drugs directly into tumors.
4. Interdisciplinary cancer study cited.
5. The David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research to be launched in 2010 at MIT.

5. The last one, an institute, is infact a five prong strategy launched towards countering the most feared of all diseases, the cancers.

4. In the Interdisciplinary cancer study, scientists find that with the help of nanotechnology they can detect cancer from bodily fluids at early stages. The case studied is of liver cancer. The malignant cells are much loose compared to their normal counterparts and their dissociation begins much earlier in the disease. Nanoparticles have been designed to detect these malignant cells early.

3. Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia, another engineer and a professor at the Harvard-MIT research program, have developed nanoparticles that can safely home in and deliver drugs to the tumors. This is an ingenious work because the nanoparticles are attached to DNA probes; the length of the DNA probe determines the melting point of the particles, hence the delivery of the drug is controlled using electromagnetic waves, the trascripts to which these particles "talk back" amazingly.

1. Focussed microwave heat treatment along with cancer chemotherapy can shrunk as much as 50% of the breast tumors, a study cited in the November, 2007 issue of Cancer Therapy.

2. Carlos Lois, a neuroscientist at MIT is skeptical of using neural stem cell therapy for various CNS disorders, including storkes and neurodegenerative disorders. His findings render him so; he has discovered that each neural stem cell is preset to formulate only a specific set of neuronal connection, hence taking any of the adult neural stem cells, proliferating them in vitro and then transplanting them into any site of injury within CNS, he says, might not work. The scientist need to figure out how to manipulate these NSCs genetically to help figure out how to stop the preset differentiations of NSCs and then push them into formulation of cells of choice before using them for therapy.