So What is Apoptosis?

Filed in archive Biotech on June 20, 2008

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Sven Hoppe

If you've been following any nanotechnology news, you've probably seen this term called "apoptosis." What does this word mean? Programmed cell death. That's right. Our cells know when they should destroy themselves. If a human cell detects some type of abnormality, then it is programmed to self-destruct and undergo apoptosis. However, this mechanism gets dysfunctional in cancer, so cells that should be dying continue to live, divide, and spread.

A recent discovery in cancer research involves the use of human tumor nanoparticles to cause cell death in pancreatic cancer. In other words, these nanoparticles carried some type of signaling message to cancer cells and told them that they should self-destruct. If you can target this message to the correct cells, then you could cause a tumor to destroy itself. What a discovery! Read about it here.