Cancer Research UK on The Rest Is Science

You can pack the inside of them with the drug that you need. You seal the chemotherapy inside those micro-bubbles. And we're talking really tiny here, right? One to ten micrometres in diameter, smaller than the width of the human hair, over 30 times smaller than a grain of table salt. Really, really, really minuscule doses of extremely potent drugs. But to get them to the right part of the body, you need some sort of guidance system. So you inject them in, and then these micro-bubbles will find their way to the cancer either because they are attached with loads of antibodies to them so it sort of uses the same technique as your immune system does to hunt down an infection but instead it's these bubbles that are hunting down a tumor at which point it has the chemotherapy inside or sometimes what you can do right you can attach these tiny magnetic nanoparticles to the bubbles and then physically pull the bubbles through the body with a giant external magnet. How wild is that? I mean, insane. I want to be the drug driver with the magnet who's just like, and I'm going to put that here. I'm going to put that there. So when you get them to the right part, when you as the drug driver get there, then all you do is you beam ultrasound waves at the tumor. So the bubbles end up vibrating so much that they burst. And then the drug gets released at exactly the site of the cancer cells. This is like hyper-targeted drug delivery, keeping your healthy cells safe so that you end up with less side effects. And by the way, we're at the stage now where this successfully treats some cancers in the lab. And they're now preparing to launch this in clinical trials. It's very exciting, but there's one other big challenge. Okay. So you can drive these drugs where you want them. That doesn't mean they can get through the gates that have been erected because although these bubbles are tiny, I mean, a fraction of a grain of salt, guess what? Some things in our body are protected against even things that small like the brain. Okay. Brain tumors are a huge challenge for drugs because our brains are surrounded by this. It's basically this tight locked cellular bodyguard chain. It's called the blood-brain barrier. And it stops a lot of drugs from getting in. Even if they're in a bubble, they're still too big. So to give you a sense of how...