July 20, 2008
The Kanzius Machine: A Cancer Cure?
Inventor Tells 60 Minutes He Hopes To Live Long Enough To See Machine Cure Humans
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Play CBS Video Video The Kanzius Machine Lesley Stahl meets a man who invented a machine that may kill cancer cells using radio waves. (This segment was originally broadcast on April 13, 2008.)
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Video Cancer Machine Shows Promise John Kanzius, a cancer patient, invented a machine that uses radio waves to kill cancer cells. Harry Smith speaks with Kanzius and Dr. Steven Curley, who is testing the device.
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John Kanzius (CBS)
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Interactive Cancer Learn about the most common cancers, who gets them and how they are treated.
"So we take the nanoparticles, we put 'em in the radio field. And in about 15 seconds, they’re boiling and heating and Steve Curley couldn't contain himself. He called Rick Smalley and he said, 'Rick, you’re not going to believe this. He just blew the smithereens out of your nanoparticles,'" Kanzius recalled.
Smalley's response? "The only thing that I got out of him after this pause was, “Holy s…,'" Curley recalled.
Not long after that day, Smalley died of lymphoma. Once a skeptic, he had become one of Kanzius' biggest supporters.
"He didn’t expect it, but he embraced it to his death bed when he told Dr. Curley this will change medicine forever. Don't stop, no matter what you do," Kanzius told Stahl.
And they haven't stopped. They’ve already shown that the Kanzius machine can heat nanoparticles and cook cancer to death in animals. Dr. Curley with rabbits, and in Pittsburgh, Dr. David Geller demonstrated to 60 Minutes how he used nanoparticles, made from gold, to kill liver cancer cells grown in rats.
"Now what we’re going to do is inject the nanoparticles," Dr. Geller explained. "Directly into the tumor."
In the study the rats, anesthetized to keep them still, were exposed to the Kanzius radio waves. Dr. Geller later examined their tumors under a microscope.
"What you can see is that cells are starting to fall apart. You see white spaces in between them. The body of the cell is shrinking, the cells are starting to die," Geller pointed out.
"And can you tell from this whether the area surrounding the tumor had any destruction?" Stahl asked.
"Grossly inspecting the animal, we did not see not see any damage to the surrounding tissue," Geller said.
So far, the Kanzius method has only been applied to solid, localized tumors in animals. The ultimate goal is to treat cancer that has metastasized or spread to other parts of the body. Those undetectable rogue cells are what most often kill people with cancer and the trick is finding them.
"If we can't target the microscopic cells this is not going to be a cure," Curley said.
Produced by Tanya Simon
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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See all 270 CommentsNanotechnology is an up and coming science. Delivering targeted medicine directly to cancer cells has always been one of the hallmark concepts being touted and the methods under discussion here are just one embodiment of applications for nanotechnology that are bandied about quite frequently. I am not at all surprised that such an application is appearing to work. I'm sure there are details to work through and clinical trials to run, but the basic science is fairly sound (and has been for a couple years now).
Nanotechnology will offer us a lot once we truly learn to embrace it. I once saw a group of middle school children that took the (fairly simple but very forward looking) concept of a respirocyte (I'll leave it to the reader to investigate exactly what a respirocyte *will be* once it is developed) and extended it to be a truly remarkable life saving device. With people like this coming of age, I believe there is hope for our society.
There is another cancer drug out there - DCA (dichloroacetate). They're funding clinical trials strictly through donations because it's a drug that can't be patented, drug companies can't make any money from it, and there's a good chance that it could potentially shut down many (not all) of the world's oncology centers. So, not only do big drug companies want to suppress this, doctors, nurses, and even hospital management are afraid of something like this working. Sure, there will always be some cancers that don't react well to DCA, but just think about the financial impact to the hospitals. It would be devastating, especially because I'm sure many of them are still paying on all the high priced machines used in their oncology dept!
There is this <a href="http://www.cancer-alternative.org/"> cancer alternative treatment</a>, where they apply <a href="http://www.cancer-alternative.org/gene-therapy-for-cancer/">Gene Therapy for Cancer</a>, together with other treatments like Radio Therapy, Traditional Chinese Medicine and others. My brother is going there soon.
Thanks
Also consider an entire program on cutting edge research on breast cancer. There are exciting new breast therapies being studied , some quite noninvasive. I am a registered nurse who has studied this and would like to share ideas w/a producer. Thank you . Barbara lee
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