2023-06-05 14:33:15
Lourdes Marcano, a magnetic materials researcher at the University of Oviedo, works with bacteria. And the first thing that she teaches us is that they are not bad, quite the opposite. She tells us that a 60-kilo person has three kilograms of bacteria in her body that perform vital functions. She investigates with bacteria found in nature, especially in fresh water such as rivers, streams or swamps and also marine sediments and with they want to create biological nanorobots and end with therapies as aggressive as radiation or chemotherapy.
A doctor in our body
Marcano tells us that the idea is to have a tiny doctor that we put in our body and is able to move throughout our body looking for a problem. Once he finds it, deletes it and when checking that everything is finecomes out after our body.
In the magnetic measurement laboratory of the scientific and technological services of the University of Oviedo, on the Mieres Campus, the magnetic properties of bacteria are measured. They are tiny tiny letters, less than the width of a hair, but they could be vital for the treatment of diseases such as cancer.
Bacteria with magnetic properties
The researcher shows us how she places the sample of bacteria inside the electromagnet to find out their magnetic behavior and how they can be guided with a magnet inside our organism. Inside these bacteria are magnetic nanoparticles with diameters of about 50 nanometers (100 times smaller than blood cells) that are organized inside the bacteria in the form of a chain.
It acts like a magnetic compass and orients the bacterium as a whole in the direction defined by a magnetic field. Imagine that we can orient and stick them to those malignant cells with a magnet. Lourdes Marcano tells us that these bacteria like areas with little oxygen and tumors are their ideal area because there is an oxygen deficit there because the tumor cells are eating everything and they will naturally go there.
The idea would be to use them to treat cancer through magnetic hyperthermia the transport of medicines: they would direct the bacteria to the place where the tumor is located, and they would be heated by external fields to achieve burning cancer cells or release drugs through heat or other external stimulus. In this way the treatment would be more personalized and localized.
In addition, the side effects of radio and chemotherapy would be avoided. His research has received support from a Leonardo Grant from the BBVA Foundation. There is still a long way to go, but the first step has already been taken.
#Biological #bacteria #nanorobots #eliminate #cancer