BREAST CANCER TUMORS DESTROYED SANS SURGERY

A new breast cancer therapy that promises to destroy tumours inside the body has been developed in Wrocław in Poland, according to a Euronews report.

The technology could eliminate the need for painful surgery - and it has already won the EU's top Innovation Radar Prize.

The therapy is known as Nanocargo and involves injecting nanoparticles directly into a tumour.

Dr Joanna Bauer is the head of the team behind it at Wrocław University of Science and Technology, developed in an EU project.

She took us into the lab there and explained to us how the tests have been perfectly effective: "We see cancer cells here. The green ones are the cells we want to kill. They are all alive for now. You can see here that after 20 minutes there are fewer and fewer of these living cells that we want to kill. And finally, after 30 minutes, with the application of our nanoparticles, we have no more living cells at all," she said.

An experiment with a vial containing thousands of nanoparticles allows us to see some of the effect of this new treatment. Inside the body, the nanoparticles would be heated by both the laser and a magnetic field. It is the heat that is kills the cancer cells. At the same time, chemotherapy drugs are released from the nanoparticles right inside the tumour.

"So we have a core which is magnetic and it reacts with the magnetic field. Outside there is an additional metallic shell which is excited with the laser. On top of that we have also attached the dedicated drug, which is used during regular breast cancer chemotherapy," Dr Bauer explained.