Health

Medical discovery
by Claudia Sonea

Health is an important issue and there are many studies made to discover diseases' causes, cures, vaccines and treatments. Technology is a useful tool, helping in a better and more detailed research. On Sunday there was a study released that revealed an easier way of analyzing cancer by using a nano-scale tool that distinguishes soft cancerous cells from stiffer normal ones. Published in the British journal Nature Nanotechnology, the study is the work of a team of scientists who by the help of an atomic microscope showed for the first time that the surface of living cancer cells were more than 70 percent softer than their healthy counterparts, this being useful to measure difference in elasticity held true across lung, breast and pancreatic cancers, and could provide a powerful means of detecting malignant cells that might otherwise escape notice. At the University of California in Los Angeles, a team of researchers led by James Gimzewski made the research on body fluid from suspected cancer patients with an atomic microscope that is rather pressuring individual cells with a sharp probe attached to a mechanical arm than providing a magnified view. The result was that malignant cells were four times as soft as normal tissue across all three types of cancer examined and that they can be identified after its shape, according to Gimzewski, because a normal cell gone malignant suffers both a shape and skeleton change. In fact the softness offers the opportunity to spread easier through the body. By comparison to other types of test like analyzing surgically-removed tissue by placing stained, thinly-sliced sections on a glass slide and looking at them under a microscope for signs of the disease or using antibodies to pinpoint certain proteins is faster, but not as accurate, says MIT scientist Subra Suresh in a commentary. Furthermore, test need to be performed in order to see how the existence of other diseases might affect the tests results. Don't go away….more to come!

related story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20071202/thl-health-science-disease-cancer-nanote-0a6016e_1.html

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

PocketNews is a new real-time news broadcaster delivering the latest and hottest news right to your pocket ! With global clients who want to be kept up to date, PocketNews is everyone's way of keeping in touch with the World.

posted by Blog TechSource @ 3:47 PM