Nanotechnology-enabled medicine

Extract: Approximately one person a minute dies of cancer in the United States. Normalized per population size, this corresponds to a current mortality rate that is essentially identical to what it was in 1950 -- a very counterintuitive finding, given the exceptional progress recorded in the fundamental scientific understanding of malignant disease in the last 50 years. Dominant among the reasons for the unsatisfactory progress in the treatment of cancer is our general inability to treat metastatic colonies, when surgical intervention and radiation therapy are no longer available options. Systemic injection with chemical and biological agents is then the choice, with the yet-unsolved problem of selectivity in the intervention on cancer cell population, or the ability to kill cancer without causing intolerable levels of unwanted collateral effects on the patient. This treatment selectivity problem breaks down into three major, related components: the ability for the therapeutic substances to reach the cancer lesion, to recognize it as the target of its action, and to perform the therapeutic intervention solely at the site of the lesion. Many approaches have been developed to address these questions, and have met with different degrees of success. Particularly promising are the recent clinical advances recorded in the field of the so-called molecularly targeted therapies, which intervene in an exquisitely selective fashion on cancer-associated biological features, such as mutations in the receptor of epidermal growth factor in cancers of epithelial origin, or the activation of the BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase pathway in chronic myelogenous leukemia.