Science News Relating to Health

[SavedOnebyGrace]

Between engineering jobs, I tried to get into nanotechnology because I saw it as a growing industry and I had some relevant experience.  But alas, God had other plans for me, but I've followed the technology for quite some time.  Here's a health article you may find interesting from Science News.

Nanoparticles beat back atherosclerosis

Scientists are designing tiny “missiles” to find and destroy waxy plaques in blood vessels

By

Sarah C.P. Williams

7:00am, May 30, 2016

NANO VARIETY Nanoparticles can repair blood vessel damage, break up plaques, stop immune molecules from overreacting and even respond to the pressure of plaque-narrowed vessels in animal studies.

Nicolle Rager Fuller

Careening through the bloodstream, a single nanoparticle is dwarfed by red blood cells whizzing by that are 100 times larger. But when specially designed nanoparticles bump into an atherosclerotic plaque — a fatty clog narrowing a blood vessel — the tiny particles can play an outsized role. They can cling to the plaque and begin to break it down, clearing the path for those big blood cells to flow more easily and calming the angry inflammation in the vicinity.

By finding and busting apart plaques in the arteries, nanoparticles may offer a new, non-surgical way to reduce a patient’s risk for heart attack and stroke.

Nanoparticles measure less than 100 nanometers across — a thousandth the thickness of a dollar bill. Despite being tiny, they can be engineered to haul a mix of molecules — such as tags that make them stick to a plaque, drugs that block inflammation or dyes that let scientists track their movements. Over the last two decades, scientists have exploited these strategies to fight cancer, designing nanoparticles that deliver drugs (SN Online: 1/3/14) or dyes for imaging deep into the core of a tumor. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a few dozen cancer-focused nanomedicines.

Drugs, dyes and targeting molecules can be arranged on the perimeter or inside of a nanoparticle (illustration shows one that mimics HDL).

S. Marrache and S. Dhar/PNAS 2013

Now researchers have begun engineering nanoparticles to target cardiovascular disease, which kills even more people each year than cancer. Nanosized compounds have been built that can sweep into clogged arteries to shrink the plaques that threaten to block blood flow. Some nanoparticles home in on the plaques by binding to immune cells in the area, some do so by mimicking natural cholesterol molecules and others search for collagen exposed in damaged vessel walls. Once at the location of a plaque, either the nanoparticles themselves or a piggybacked drug can do the cleanup work.

The aim of all these approaches is to prevent strokes and heart attacks in people with cardiovascular disease, either before surgery becomes necessary or after surgery to prevent a second event. Today, cardiovascular nanoparticles are still far from pharmacy shelves. Most have not reached safety testing in patients. But in mice, rats and pigs, nanodrugs have slowed the growth of the plaques that build up on vessel walls, and in some cases have been able to shrink or clear them.

The rest of the lengthy article can be found here: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nanoparticles-beat-back-atherosclerosis