Medicines in vials
Scientists have learned to direct drugs to tumors using sound
Nikita Shevtsov, Naked Science
Cancer treatment today is a double–edged sword. On the one hand, the most common method – chemotherapy – can effectively destroy cancer cells, and on the other – it also kills healthy ones. This causes the risk of death not from cancer, but from the side effects of chemotherapy. Therefore, doctors from all over the world are working to create ways of targeted drug delivery, with the help of which medicinal compounds would get exactly into the tumor cells, touching healthy tissues at a minimum.
One of these methods was proposed by a team of scientists from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They pumped water through a narrow silicone tube to simulate blood flow through a blood vessel. The scientists then placed the tube under the pig's skin. The researchers injected microbubbles into the fake blood vessels – tiny air pockets that can be used as vehicles for drug delivery.
In recent years, there has been a lot of research on the topic of focusing sound waves into "acoustic tweezers" that can manipulate particles. American scientists used an ultrasonic transducer to capture microbubbles and control their movement. The authors of the work were helped to detect such air structures by ultra-fast and very sensitive ultrasound diagnostics.
The team predicted the movement of the microbubble and calculated the acoustic radiation forces needed to capture it and move it to certain areas in an artificial blood vessel. Balancing the force of acoustic radiation from the sensor, the scientists moved the captured microbubbles to a certain place on the wall of the tube. Then they increased the amplitude of the waves, which caused the bubble to burst. This allowed us to conclude that it is possible to accurately deliver and release drugs in the required place of the blood vessel.
Now the researchers plan to conduct in vivo trials on rats or rabbits. In the future, the authors of the work want to further improve the resolution, sensitivity and speed of visualization of the method in real time. If this succeeds, the long-term goal of scientists will be human research.
Article by Peng et al. Ultrafast ultrasound imaging in acoustic microbubble trapping is published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.
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