'Gold Bullets' to combat prostate cancer; hey if it works, it works

Golden bullets to beat prostate cancer: Hope of breakthrough treatment to combat disease
By DAILY MAIL
July 17, 2012

A hail of tiny golden bullets could soon be used as a powerful weapon against prostate cancer.
Researchers have used microscopic 'bullets' made from a radioactive form of gold to shrink tumours by up to 80 per cent, and found few side-effects.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in British men, affecting almost 41,000 a year and killing more than 10,000.

Although various radiation treatments are already used, none is perfect, with problems ranging from damage to surrounding tissues to difficulty in making the dose big enough.

Prostate cancer cells seen in close up under under a microscope (image courtesy of Wellcome Image Awards)

The 'golden bullets' side-step many of these problems, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports.

The promising initial results come from experiments in mice but the US researchers said they hope to start running tests on men soon.

The scientists, from the University of Missouri-Columbia, made tiny particles from a radioactive form of gold.

These were coated with a chemical that is found in tea and is known from previous studies to home in on prostate cancer cells.

In tests on mice with the cancer, the gold 'nanoparticles' rapidly shrank the tumors.

'In our study, we found that a special compound in tea was attracted to tumor cells in the prostate,' said Professor Kattesh Katti, who led the research.

'When we combined the tea compound with radioactive gold nanoparticles, the tea compound helped 'deliver' the nanoparticles to the site of the tumors and the nanoparticles destroyed the tumor cells very efficiently.'

Further tests showed that as well as being highly effective, the animals experienced few side-effects...

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