This is pretty cool:
In the fight against cancer, some scientists are thinking small. Really, really small.
The National Cancer Institute launches a five-year, $144 million project today to investigate using nanotechnology, the science of building devices on the atomic level, to fight cancer.
The treatments that will be looked at include, among other approaches, the use of gold nanoshells that “cook” tumor cells to death and nanoparticles that deliver chemotherapy on a cell-by-cell basis. We’ve been tracking these developments over the past year (here and here, for example). It’s gratifying to see these lines of research get additional funding. Moreover, with the blessing of the National Cancer Institute, it would seem that nanomedicine is well on its way to being mainstream.
(via Kurzweil AI)