New Anti Cancer Gel Developed

New Anti Cancer Gel Developed

Latest Health Tips

Developed by professor of Macromolecular Science - Akira Harada - and his team at Osaka University in Japan, a gel that expands and contracts when hit with light is believed to be able to work at cutting off the blood supply to a tumour, and also be used inside a person's body to pump drugs to specific locations at specific times.

Health Care

Made from a polymer - hydrogel - and the two chemicals alpha-cyclodextrin and azobenzen, which both work in similar ways to muscle-contracting enzymes in the body, this gel, when exposed to ultraviolet light, expands, and when exposed to red light, contracts.

It was found that striking a gel-strip with UV light from different directions made it bend away from the light, only the irradiated surface absorbing the light, the other side not, so the strip bends. This expansion and contraction occurs because of the way the two added chemicals change when the light hits them. Cyclodextrin and azobenzene molecules are bound to each other and molecules that make up the gel. 

But when UV light disturbs those bonds, the shape of the azobenzene molecule changes as it breaks from the cyclodextrin, allowing the gel molecules to spread out, expanding the volume. Red light restores the original shapes of the molecules, making them bind tightly again, and shrinking the gel once again, a process that could be repeated indefinitely

How To Make Your Heart Healthy?

The notion is that using the gel in a medical situation could possibly involve a doctor injecting it into a vein, before running an very thin optical fibre to the required location for delivering the light. Any gel laced with drugs could, in theory, release them at the sight as it expanded, foe example within a blood vessel feeding a tumour, to cut off the supply, though as yet reaction-time to light is still too slow, future experiments hopefully showing how to speed up this aspect of it.

Health Benefits of Carrots