A little caution with this new nanoscope

Microscope could ‘solve the cause of viruses’
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team have created a microscope which shatters the record for the smallest object the eye can see, beating the diffraction limit of light.

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The description of how easy it might be to greatly increase the ability of optical microscopes to see minute images is exciting.

But, as mentioned here, others have not been able to replicate the work yet. And, more importantly, the images shown are all static ones, of things like wires that do not move.

Living things, like cells, are in a medium where Brownian motion often becomes huge. This is something that can be seen even at the lower magnifications seen today.

What happens when we look even smaller? The motion that just looks like wiggles now become huge translations. It would be really hard to focus on any one part.

Perhaps cooling things down would help.

I wonder if they could use software to ‘hold’ things in place?

That is what is exciting about new technologies – they give us the ability to try and answer questions we could not before. I’m hoping that this holds up because there are some interesting things that could be done.

Some details to look for in any annoucement of cancer cures

by Nutloaf

WSU researcher creates patented personalized therapy that causes cancer cells to kill themselves
[Via EurekAlert! - Biology]

(Wayne State University – Office of the Vice President for Research) A Wayne State University School of Medicine physician-researcher has developed a personalized therapy to treat a wide range of cancers. The treatment is based on a naturally occurring human enzyme that has been genetically modified to fool cancer cells into killing themselves.

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Always look to see what stage the research is at – in isolated cells, in animal models in humans. Here it is in isolated cells.

They has not developed a therapy that can treat any cancer in humans yet. He has developed a process that can kill cancer cell lines in a test tube. There is no data on how this will work in a human body, where they will have to target the cancer cells specifically and not normal cells. If the therapy also hits normal cells at a high frequency, it will be worthless.

They state “In the near future he intends to test the therapy in an animal model, an intermediate step required before moving the treatment into clinical trial.”

Not going to see any results here soon.

But this is an interesting exercise in protein engineering. They have taken an enzyme and adapted it to have one purpose – degrade DNA in a cell’s nucleus. Normally when this happens, the cell dies.

So, they show that when this enzyme is active inside a human cell line that is normally resistant to this deathly cell process, they are able to initiate programmed cell death.

Very nice but a long, long way from showing that it can do anything in a human tumor, even if they can find a way to target the cells directly.

We won’t see a therapy based on this for quite a while, if ever.