Discussion for all things in the medical field:
To start off, why don't we have nanobots delivering targeted chemotherapy yet?
Medicine general
John Williams
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Christopher Gomez
>nanobots
Viruses are better. youtube.com
They're not as efficient as this video makes it seem though.
Xavier Bell
Have you seen T4-phage? It's basically the picture that you posted except smaller and more efficient. It's a virus.
We use viruses like it as vectors to target cells and inject biomaterial (usually DNA or RNA).
Lots of bioengineering relies on commandeering the nanotechnology that has evolved in biology rather than building nanotechnology from scratch.
Human engineering is very far away from evolution's product, but the lines get blurrier every day as bioengineering, nanotechnology, etc. continue to advance.
Michael Brooks
their all stuck in phase II
Grayson Barnes
I'm not sure if it is being used yet, but by using electromagnetic waves and mixing some magnetic material with the drug we are able to target the chemotherapy
Zachary Green
Oh, I just got excited to show you the t4-phage and forgot to answer your question.
>targeted
That's the magic word right there.
The trick is killing cancer cells without killing your cells. How do you do that when the cancer cells are your cells just replicating out of control? What can you use to label them as "bad"?
Well, it turns out there are a lot of reasons that your cells replicate out of control (i.e. cancer) and there have in fact been a lot of cures for cancer.
It's just that there is not a universal cure for cancer other than semi-indiscriminately blasting them with targeted radiation.
Noah White
>nanobots
Just pour a fuckton of money in CRISPR/Cas9 research. It basically provides limitless opportunities.
Colton Sanchez
Targeting is not as hard as you make it sound. EPR effect and receptor differences are good enough to enable various approaches, and the rest is just engineering.
Gabriel Bennett
Targeting is a key word in anti-Cancer therapies. I have read about Targeting certain mitotic phases to stop cancer cells muting and multiplying, using antagonists in the cell cycle.
Nolan Powell
wrong
Xavier Davis
Targeting is extremely difficult. That's usually where promising drugs fail. You can design a drug to kill the cells you want to kill, but it's very difficult to get the specificity required for the drug to not kill the entire organism.
I do extremely early stage drug design trying to make peptides that target particular proteins or protein interactions, with the idea being that if you can hit your target well you can build a larger drug around the peptide as a delivery system.
Since I've been at my company I've worked on probably close to 3000 peptide designs for various projects and maybe 20 have passed our requirements for affinity and specificity. And even then that's no guarantee that those peptides can be successfully built out into larger drugs.
Hunter Sullivan
>I do extremely early stage drug design trying to make peptides that target particular proteins or protein interactions
Yes! This is exactly what targeting tries to do, we need to find certain proteins or peptidic interactions to attack them. I specially care about the proteins present in the mitotic process, we can stop them with targeting until the cell dies from apoptosis.
Easton Garcia
already tried that
its simply much harder than anticipated. is right, viruses would be a much more suitable choice.
read up on the OTC deficiency Gene therapy trial which resulted in the death pf the patien a certain Jesse Gelsinger.
of corse they sued and now there is so many administrative hurdle. this trial pretty much single handily set back gene therapy for decade.
am still tryin to wrap my head arround IRB and shit
Blake Sanchez
Mitotic processes are one family of targets.
Another big one is the family of proteins involved in apoptosis. In a lot of cancers you'll see overexpression of proteins that will inhibit p53 or other apoptosis pathways. If you can deactivate the overexpressed proteins cell death resumes as normal.
The more far reaching goal of the industry is to have a complete list of proteins and other substances involved with cancer, and molecular targets for each.
The idea being you biopsy a tumor and identify which proteins are acting out in hat particular tumor, and then formulate a custom drug mix to target the irregularities present in the tumor.
Grayson Bailey
this will help Veeky Forums immensely
i pray for your peptides' suitability
Kevin Bailey
mainly because we can't and we have better options.
Ian Wilson
What can I do to make use of a bachelor of medical science if I don't intend on a career in medical science anymore? I decided I'm going to become an apprentice plumber instead so I can make money, is this a bad idea?
Jaxson Gonzalez
>nanobots
Ryder Davis
So why haven't they tried inserting a brain implant, such as a Utah array into the motor cortex of a person, and connecting that to a prosthetic arm with the hopes of finer coordination? I would think it is technically feasible to have a wireless implant. I'm imagining something powered by radio waves designed to work off of a really small amount of power, so you could avoid having a wire sticking out of someone's head, prone to infection. But I've also read that brain implants tend to degrade overtime, such that eventually all signal is lost.
What are the major hurdles to getting such a system implemented?
Caleb Bennett
Thought this was going to be a thread involving medical students, but unfortunately it's another science fiction thread based on "facts" and """extrapolation""".
>To start off, why don't we have nanobots delivering targeted chemotherapy yet?
I don't know. Maybe the fact that we don't even have microbots yet has something to do with it. Also why fucking nanobots? They'd be too small to do anything meaningful. A somatic cell sized bot (micron level) would be more useful.
Adrian Clark
Brainlet detected.
Sebastian Ramirez
I attended a lecture from someone who was working on BMIs from Canada.
One issue is that someone of the electronics are "dumb".
They often burn out or wear away neurons because their signal is too strong or too persistent.
The guy from Canada had made some nice progress programming neural circuits to respond to some more sophisticated electronics. I think he was able to program a song into a small neural network (the biological kind).