Scientists in Montreal are on the verge of starting a fantastic voyage into the human body to treat cancer.
Half a century after the release of the sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage, the Polytechnique Montreal Nanorobotics Labroatory has introduced the first operating room capable of reproducing the script in modern form.
The 1966 movie, starring Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch, told the tale of a submarine crew who shrink to microscopic size and travel through the bloodstream of a human to repair damage to his brain.
Their aim was to destroy a blood clot in a part of the brain that was unreachable by surgery.
Micro-transporter crews controlled by magnetic fields have been developed to travel through the human body's 100,000 kilometres of blood vessels, a distance equivalent to two-and-a-half times the Earth's circumference.
"This is a new script, an innovative journey in the fight against cancer, with therapeutic agents delivered directly inside tumours providing hope for new and more effective treatments," says the laboratory's director Professor Sylvain Martel.
Linking the imagination of man with the advance in medical technology, the scientists will navigate tiny carriers, or bacteria just a fraction of the thickness of hair, through the arteries using clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) .
This army of "doctors invisible to the naked eye" will be armed with drugs to be released when they reach the site of the cancerous tumour.
"Our work represents a new vision of cancer treatments, with our goal being to develop the most effective transportation systems for the delivery of therapeutic agents right to tumour cells, to areas unreachable by conventional treatments," said Professor Martel.
Prof Martel's team has succeeded in using this procedure to administer therapeutic agents in colorectal tumours in mice.
The results of their pioneering research, published in medical journal Nature Nanotechnology, has been heralded as a "new era" in cancer treatment.
Dr Gerald Batist from the Jewish General Hospital says the advanced procedure provides optimal targeting of a tumour while preserving surrounding healthy organs and tissue, unlike current chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
