Bench Press

It is unfortunate that much of what we need to do to the human body to treat it requires that we cut it open, as this creates a whole set of risks and complications for science and medicine. Thankfully, science and technology march on in the quest to reduce our dependence on invasive surgeries. An interesting Economist article takes a look into some of the more unconventional tools that are being explored as potential non-invasive replacements.

Let’s take a classic problem which often has a surgical solution: the removal of a cancerous tumor. How could we solve this without resorting to the use of a scalpel?

• Of course, there’s radiation – which, as we’ve discussed before, is potentially dangerous if the radiation dosage isn’t calculated sufficiently well.
• The use of ultrasound as a means to visualize what’s going on under the skin is commonly known. But a small startup in Washington called Mirabilis Medica came up with a means to use ultrasound not only to see a tumor or blood clot, but also to focus it and generate enough heat to destroy the tumor/blood clot (what they’ve called High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound or HIFU; explanatory diagram below).

• Professor Weihong Tan at the University of Florida published a paper in PNAS in early 2009 a means of using light as a way of non-invasively activating blood clotting. The system is described in the picture below, but relies on a means of inhibiting the activity of Thrombin (a protein that helps control blood clotting) with short stretches of DNA (which they’ve cutely termed “Thrombin-binding Aptamers” or TBA) that have been chemically modified to be able to change shape in the light (cis-trans isomerization under photon stimulation). The vision is to one day be able to inject a patient with these Thrombin-TBA “molecular clasps” and hit the patient with a light source, cutting off the blood flow to the tumor and all without needing invasive surgery!

These only scratch the surface of what new technologies and scientific advances might be capable of. Son et lumiere (sound and light) as surgical tools indeed!

(Image credit) (Image credit – Mirabilis Medica) (Image credit – PNAS publication)