Voyage of the Nano-Surgeons

[Randall_F_Brich@RL.GOV]

An interesting article on DNA repair research for astronauts. 

Randy Brich



http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nanotech-02b.html



<SNIP>Voyage of the Nano-Surgeons

by Patrick Barry 

for NASA Science News

Huntsville - Jan 15, 2002

It's like a scene from the movie "Fantastic Voyage." A tiny vessel -- far

smaller than a human cell -- tumbles through a patient's bloodstream,

hunting down diseased cells and penetrating their membranes to deliver

precise doses of medicines.

Only this isn't Hollywood. This is real science.



Researchers funded by a grant from NASA recently began a project to make

this futuristic scenario a reality. If successful, the "vessels" developed

by these scientists -- called nanoparticles or nanocapsules -- could help

make another science fiction story come true: human exploration of Mars and

other long-term habitation of space.



While space applications will be the researchers' primary focus,

nanoparticles also hold great potential for many fields of medicine,

particularly cancer treatment. The tantalizing promise of delivering

tumor-killing poisons directly to cancerous cells, thus averting the

ravaging side-effects of chemotherapy, has generated a lot of interest in

nanoparticles among the medical community.



"The purpose of these nanoparticles is to introduce a new type of therapy --

to actually go inside individual cells ... and repair them, or, if there's a

lot of damage, to get rid of those cells," explains James Leary of the

University of Texas Medical Branch. Leary is leading the research along with

Stephen Lloyd, and Massoud Motamedi, also from the University of Texas;

Nicholas Kotov of Oklahoma State University; and Yuri Lvov of Louisiana Tech

University.



Their project will focus on a problem related to cancer -- the high

radiation doses experienced by astronauts in space, especially on journeys

to the Moon or to Mars, which require leaving the protective umbrella of the

giant magnetic field surrounding the Earth.



Even the advanced materials used for radiation shielding on spacecraft can't

fully insulate astronauts from the high-energy radiation of space. These

photons and particles pierce the astronauts' bodies like infinitesimal

bullets, blasting apart molecules in their path. When DNA is damaged by this

radiation, cells can behave erratically, sometimes leading to cancers.



"This is an important problem," Leary says. "If humans are going to live in

space, we have to figure out how to protect them from radiation better."



Because shielding alone probably won't solve the problem, scientists must

find some way to make the astronauts themselves more resistant to radiation

damage.<UNSNIP>

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