New iron nanomaterial wipes out cancer cells without harming healthy tissue

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260228093456.htm

by gradus_ad • 5 months ago

322 95 5 months ago

sciencedaily.com

mcc1ane• 5 months ago

in mice?

YarickR2• 5 months ago

Human breast cancer, in mice.

jbotz• 5 months ago

Yes, in mice, but human cancer cells:

"When we systemically administered our nanoagent in mice bearing human breast cancer cells, it efficiently accumulated in tumors, robustly generated reactive oxygen species and completely eradicated the cancer without adverse effects ..."

So it kills human cancer and doesn't harm the mouse in the process.

greygoo2227• 5 months ago

Xenografted human tumors in mice != human cancer. The support structure of the tumor (tumor microenvironment) differs between model mice and humans, cells derived from human cancer that can be cultivated in a lab and xenografted differ from typical human cancer cells, and xenografting requires immunodeficient mice, just to name a few factors that affect treatment response.

Mice models of cancer are useful, but you should never be too surprised when something that works in mice doesn't work in the clinic, xenografting or no. Cancer is complicated.

yyyk• 5 months ago

Doesn't harm the mouse. But would it harm the normal human cells?

dyauspitr• 5 months ago

Anything that doesn’t genetically target cancer cells is just not the solution long term. Any progress is good though.

lightedman• 5 months ago

Literally reactive oxygen species targets cancer cell DNA. We are taking advantage of the unique chemical environment of the inside of a cancer cell and using it to generate oxygen in a double-whammy to destroy itself.

This is perhaps the best targeted method devised as it seems to collect basically entirely in tumors. Chemo and Radio therapy just aren't that targeted.

msie• 5 months ago

They should give it to some people with fatal stages of cancer.

gimmeThaBeet• 5 months ago

I agree, or at least I would stress that people should be allowed to consent to that. I don't know what the prevailing medical ethics of doing that kind of thing in consenting patients in that state, but my uninformed intuition is I would disagree with it.

Though one thing that I might think researchers might not want is people may be too sick to recover even if their cancer disappeared tomorrow.

tyre• 5 months ago

In the US, the FDA has a Compassionate Use exemption to clinical trials for exactly this circumstance!

There must be informed consent, no reasonable alternatives (which, in cases we deem terminal, is often the case), and some evidence pointing to the treatment possibly being helpful. It's an excellent ethical program that gives patients a choice and advances science.

greygoo2227• 5 months ago

Both patient participation in clinical trials and compassionate use of experimental treatments are fairly common for cancer patients, with various accessibility barriers. (One issue with the latter, for example, is that the incentives aren't lined up for companies to provide unapproved drugs to dying patients, you're way more likely to get a horrible complication that leads to bad press than a miraculous recovery).

Here's an insightful blog series about Jake Seliger's experience participating in clinical trials. He was a regular HackerNews user who passed away in 2024: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...

contingencies• 5 months ago

Both of my parents have benefited from access to early medical trials. One is currently very late stage IV cancer. Access to trials is usually proxied through respected doctors/oncologists affiliated with major hospitals rather than offered broadly. I assume for reasons of experimental protocol and integrity the overseeing doctors are typically not the same as the conceiving research team.

mike_d2• 5 months ago

That is exactly how clinical research works. My mother worked running clinical trials for two decades.

When she was diagnosed with leukemia she was able to get into a research study herself that gave us 10 more years together.

One of the horrible but necessary parts of trials is the control group, who receives placebo. This is only done in a few of the trial phases but is essential in measuring efficacy. If someone wants to throw their brainpower and a little bit of AI/tech at the problem, you could end up eliminating a lot of suffering.

whatshisface2• 5 months ago

AI and tech won't help, but if the threshold to try a drug were adjusted to exactly the right threshold, where enrolling in a study would be expected-value neutral (this is by marginal reasoning), taking a placebo would not be worse than not.

kulahan5• 5 months ago

Well yeah, that's the plan. Every medicine needs testing in humans before going widespread. That's... how it always worked.

esafak2• 5 months ago

If it worked, how much might it roughly cost per treatment, at scale?

stevekemp• 5 months ago

Does the cost matter? Many countries subsidize healthcare, so there's either no charge or a token payment which doesn't even pretend to cover the cost of treatment.

Other countries use insurance, so once again the end cost is essentially irrelevant.

esafak2• 5 months ago

Of course it does. Countries have budgets. Expensive drugs aren't doled out like candy; they require screening, waits, connections, and even bribes.

Groxx• 5 months ago

Yes? Countries that subsidize healthcare don't calculate infinite value per person.

nickjj• 5 months ago

Other countries use insurance, so once again the end cost is essentially irrelevant.

I think it matters because oftentimes insurance companies won't cover treatments if a cheaper form of treatment exists. It doesn't matter if the old treatment is less effective or a much worse outcome for a patient. This is especially true for "new" treatments.

skeletal88• 5 months ago

The cost absolutely matters. If something costs tens of thousands of € per month for a long time then it will either not be approved or will be used very rarely. The cost is not irrelevant because the insurance does not have infinite money. They need to decide which cures, medicines, operations they fund. They can spend 1000€ to cure 100 people of something or to spend 100k to maybe cure someone with an experimental treatment.

This is one of the issues with the modern cancer cures, thst they are very specific to the cancer, the patient, need one off lab work for each patient and this makes them very expensive and not affordable to many. Despite having public healthcare the managers of it still need to decide what to spend their limited funds on.

inglor_cz2• 5 months ago

Cost is always relevant, given that the amount of money in any healthcare system is limited and someone must decide whether to pay for patient A or patient B.

alansaber• 5 months ago

As far as nanomaterial assembly goes MOF syntheis is pretty scalable

abeppu• 5 months ago

Actually, when in the lifecycle of developing a treatment does anyone have a real idea of what cost will be? Can anyone know this yet?

In terms of where _prices_ are set, that negotiation is a function of efficacy relative to other things in the market right? If it ends up treating cancers that each already have a reasonably effective treatment, maybe the pricing isn't that high -- but if it is effective in cases where currently there are no options, the price should be high?

But for something that potentially works against a range of cancers, should we expect to see a sequence of more specific trials (i.e. one phase 1 for basic safety, a bunch of phase 2s for efficacy on specific cancer types, a sequence of phase 3s in descending order of estimated market value? And in 10 years, Alice and Bob with different cancers will pay radically different amounts for almost exactly the same treatment but with small variations in some aspect of the formulation so they can be treated as distinct products?

mike_d2• 5 months ago

Pharmaceutical companies don't just fund research without having a model of the expected costs to bring something to market, the expected market size, and the viability and cost effectiveness of other potential treatments.

They have entire teams of people who figure out the viability and pricing of therapeutics before the first dollar is spent, with estimates getting refined the further you get along in the cycle.

mcswell2• 5 months ago

I have no idea whether this is real, nor do I know how the concentration compares with that used in the study, but https://www.nanominerals.co.uk/products/the-health-factory-n... advertises it as a supplement (not as a medicine) for $40/ half liter.

(The ad also claims that the water their iron is suspended in is "energized", which makes the rest of the ad seem...questionable.)

RomanPushkin2• 5 months ago

Experiencing cancer in my family I can tell for sure all of that buzz is quite exciting, but in the last 5 years there haven't been breakthroughs that would significantly improve outcomes for an average patient.

Retric2• 5 months ago

Major breakthroughs of the kind you’re talking about are extremely uncommon. Instead it’s lots of little gains that keep adding up because cancer isn’t adapting overall people still get the same mutations they got 10,000 years ago.

So average person with cancer does better when any individuals cancer treatment improves and it keeps compounding over time. This doesn’t mean everyone with cancer gets a slight improvement, often it’s specific types or stages that improve without impacting others. Where general progress comes from is it’s not the same improvements year after year.

SapporoChris• 5 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cancer_treatment_d... I won't debate what merits a major breakthrough. I will say, that while there hasn't been any major developments in the past five years, I can't draw any conclusions from that tidbit of information.

slapshot• 5 months ago

There have been massive improvements in treatments in the last 5 years. Sure, cancer is far from being "cured" - but survival today is far better than 5 years ago for many forms.

Among many others:

- CAR T therapy going from lab to oncology suite (first launch 2017, but use rapidly growing)

- Approval of Keytruda and similar for many additional forms of cancer (see the 2021-2026 milestones here: https://www.drugs.com/history/keytruda.html )

- Liquid biopsy going from lab to PCP's office - starting with Grail Galleri and moving from there (yes, the NIH results were weak, but the idea of a liquid biopsy at all would be laughed off 10 years ago)

- Move of Atezolizumab and Tecentriq from infusion (hour) to injection (minutes) to increase availability

- Lower dose CT scanning for lung cancer, including for non-smokers

And a long line of immunotherapies that are making the leap from lab to chair right now.

The last 5 years have probably been the most exciting in cancer research since the launch of the monoclonal antibodies in the early 2010s. There is still incredibly far to go, but the trend is in the right direction: https://employercoverage.substack.com/p/decline-in-cancer-mo...

baxtr2• 5 months ago

You seem to be knowledgeable on this topic.

What’s your prediction for the next five years?

parineum2• 5 months ago

I've heard that the improvements in cancer survival are mostly a statistical trick centered around earlier detection.

That people aren't actually living longer with cancer, they're living longer while we know they have cancer.

Is there any truth to that?

greygoo2227• 5 months ago

mRNA cancer vaccines are the most exciting new treatment about to hit the clinic. Moderna's Phase 2b intismeran autogene randomized trial found a 49% (!!!) reduction in the risk recurrence or death for patients with high risk melanoma already on standard treatment. Several Phase 3 trials are underway. mRNA vaccines have the potential to work for a wide variety of tumors.

(95% confidence interval is 0.294-0.887, wide but not too wide, n=157, to be expected for phase 2).

How they work is also completely fucking insane. Intismeran autogene is personalized for every patient via sequencing their tumor DNA. That's sci-fi shit. If you're not impressed by that, you should be. Fast and scalable DNA sequencing, neoantigen identification, RNA synthesis, none of this is easy and all of it relies on recent innovations across multiple fields.

The first proofs of concept for personalized vaccines like this date back to 2017[1] or 2015[2]. The process for designing the vaccines requires a machine learning algorithm first published in 2020[3]. Details of the algorithm aren't available, but it validated against data published in 2019[4], and there have been many recent advancements in algorithms and datasets for biotech ML that it likely relied on. As you might already know, mRNA vaccines were first tested in humans around the 2010s[5].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22991 [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25837513/ [3] https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/80/16_Supplement/... [4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7138461/ [5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26082837/

RomanPushkin2• 5 months ago

CAR T

it was available for [some] UCSF patients more than 5 years ago

ImageXav• 5 months ago

It may feel that way due to the iterative nature of medical improvements, but over the past few decades there has been a consistent reduction in cancer mortality rates across most types of cancer [0]. Treatments really are getting better and more targeted. Immunotherapy has made huge breakthroughs. Combination treatments allow for significantly improved lifespans and better quality of life during treatments. There are a few cancers that remain hard to treat, but I have a lot of confidence that in the coming decades we will make strides in attacking them. That being said, I'm very sorry to hear about the pain you and your family must be going through. I've had a few close loved ones undergo cancer treatment and it was tough.

[0] https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac...

greygoo2227• 5 months ago

Examples aside, 5 years isn't long enough for a treatment to move from early mice trials to clinical use. The average time from application to FDA approval is about 10 years.

The breakthroughs happening now will benefit average patients later. It's frustrating, but it's not because we've run out of innovations.

xbar• 5 months ago

I lost my brother yesterday to cancer. I hope one day this can save lives. Go Beavs.

Barbing• 5 months ago

<3 awful buddy

me too

Tagbert• 5 months ago

I'm sorry you have to go through that. Speaking from experience.

calgoo• 5 months ago

throwup2385• 5 months ago

Go Beavs.

That's also Caltech's mascot!

Bernoulli the Beaver.

javiramos2• 5 months ago

And MIT's!

efavdb• 5 months ago

I never heard the “Bernoulli” part, new?

javiramos2• 5 months ago

Zeetah• 5 months ago

Condolences to you, and your family. Hugs.

fghorow2• 5 months ago

May peace be unto him, you, and the rest of your family.

When (if?) you feel ready, there is an organization [1] whose mission is to support siblings, parents, and grandparents of children who have died at any age. I have been heavily active with them since losing my only child 9+ years ago. I commend them to your attention. (Once again, when you feel ready.)

[1] compassionatefriends.org

fnord772• 5 months ago

Command-F "mice"

yup. every time

bahmboo• 5 months ago

Yes, but they were human cancer cells.

kulahan5• 5 months ago

The result that it didn't affect any other cells really doesn't matter nearly as much when the other unaffected cells are literally from a completely different animal.

quantummagic• 5 months ago

Hope this makes it to people soon. Have a family friend who was diagnosed with cancer a few days ago. It was here in Canada, so they offered her assisted suicide, literally within 30 seconds after telling her she had cancer. She didn't even really process the diagnosis before they were offering to help her die. They didn't offer to try any experimental medicine.

MagicMoonlight2• 5 months ago

Were you actually there? Because that doesn’t sound very likely.

zdragnar4• 5 months ago

Not a comment on the parent post's situation, but MAID in Canada isn't quite turning out how it was promised. A recent report making a splash in certain circles pointed out that ~200 people in Ontario in 2023 got assisted suicide either the same day or the day after they filed their paperwork. The most notable case was a woman who, after submitting her paperwork, changed her mind and wanted hospice instead. However, she was denied hospice care and subsequently was put down.

Bit by bit, Canada risks defaulting to suicide over expensive care. That's not what people voted for when it was first proposed.

https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/MDRC-...

tim-tday• 5 months ago

Vet and Paralympian spent four years fighting to get a wheelchair lift installed. Repeatedly offered medically assisted suicide instead.

https://indepnews.org/en/veteran-offered-suicide-instead-of-...

sam345• 5 months ago

That's truly sick.

childintime• 5 months ago

In the next 30 seconds you get ads for a coffin or a crematory. We're only trying to help you! Just like government itself is here to "help" us.

MagicMoonlight2• 5 months ago

That sounds extremely promising

fghorow2• 5 months ago

What is the delivery mechanism for the MOF. The chemistry sounds promising (to this amateur, at least) but how does it get to and enter cancer cells?

kulahan5• 5 months ago

It sounds like their method auto-accumulates in the cells because they're the only one with the right conditions to attract these chemicals?

nicwilson• 5 months ago

(Having not read the article), most likely because the cancer cells (at least at more advanced stages) are busy trying to replicate as fast as possible, so they take up nutrients at a much faster rate than non-cancerous cells. As to why Iron in particular, it is used as a cofactor for enzyme and if Iron is a limiting factor for replication then supplying it will lead to a burst of growth which then (presumably by applying strong oscillatory magnetic fields) you can target those cells directly to locally boil them.

How do the iron nano materials get there? probably a combination of vasculature and diffusion.

They have done this kind of stuff before with gold nanoparticles, iron is a lot more abundant.

mcswell2• 5 months ago

It seems like you could also help direct the iron to the tumor with magnets. That seems too simple to be true, but I don't see why it wouldn't be.

v3ss0n• 5 months ago

Will this be buried like rest if cancer cures?

stevenjgarner• 5 months ago

Actual paper: https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/new-cancer-killing-materia...

New iron nanomaterial wipes out cancer cells without harming healthy tissue

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