Bioengineers target cancer with electric pulses:

[Praxius]

Bioengineers target cancer with electric pulses

U.S. biomedical engineers expect clinical trials to start within a year on what they called a "minimally invasive method" of treating cancer using electric pulses, beginning with men who have prostate cancer. Using a process called "irreversible electroporation" (IRE), the engineers successfully removed tissue from the livers of male rats, the researchers said in a release issued Thursday. "We did not use any drugs, the cells were destroyed, and the vessel architecture was preserved," said Rafael Davalos, from the Virginia Tech–Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Science. He is working with his former PhD adviser and published IRE researcher Boris Rubinsky, a bioengineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Electroporation is a well-known process that affects the permeability of a cell. Usually cells are impermeable, but electroporation can create a reversible opening or an irreversible opening. Creating an irreversible opening kills the cell. The researchers sent a series of short, intense, carefully targeted electric pulses from small electrodes placed in or around the body, creating "permanent openings in the pores in the cells of the undesirable tissue," Davalos said. The openings eventually killed the cells. They were able to hit just the target cells by adjusting the current, avoiding the side effects of other cancer treatments. Rubinsky reported tests on pigs in early 2007. An article on the Rubinsky-Davalos work on IRE will be published in August in the journal Technology in Cancer Research and Treatment.

I knew the best method of attacking cancer was to isolate the method of your attack specifically towards the cancer cells..... this is pretty much an easier method then how I was thinking of solving the problem, where my method was closer to relation of nano-bots with the entire library of human genetic coding and DNA structures stored in each one, and they would eventually track out any forign tissues, cells and bacteria in the human system and nutrelize them..... this seems to be a similar and more practical approach imo.... as well as being closer to development compared to nano-bots (which are still in their comadore 64 days)