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| Swamiblu / flickr.com |
This is not the type of diamond adorned on jewelry and accessories. Without the nanodiamonds, the drug would be ineffective on the tumor or even be rejected by the body; or higher doses of it would be too powerful for the patient to survive.
"This is the first work to demonstrate the significance and translational potential of nanodiamonds in the treatment of chemotherapy-resistant cancers," explained the results of the study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Chemotherapy drug resistance results in treatment to fail in 90% of cancers that have spread inside the body, or metastatic cancer. The new research development shows promise to be used by humans in the future.
The lead author Dean Ho of Northwestern University reports that "What is most interesting from this study is when we took an even higher dose of the drug, the dose was so toxic that the animals all died. They didn't even last long enough to finish the study."
"But when we took the same higher dose and bound it to the nanodiamond, not only did all the animals survive the study, the tumor sizes were the smallest we saw in the study."
Nanodiamonds are usually formed in explosions, such as in coal mining or oil refinery operations, and may also have formed from meteorite landings.
"What is neat about it is it is almost like a waste material, it is going to be produced anyway," said Ho.
"So instead of throwing it out, taking this by product and simply processing it with things like acid washing, milling, sonification, it can yield very uniform particles of between two and eight nanometers in diameter."
Ho estimated that it would likely be a few more years before the therapy would go on the market; researchers would first have to look at how the technique works in larger animals before human clinical trials can start.
