The researchers and scientists are struggling to provide the best medications to malignant tumorous patients which involve abnormal growth of cell with the purpose to perfuse other cells.
These medications entail certain drugs and a particular type of light which are susceptible to certain wavelengths of light that can annihilate targeted cells or tumours. One such therapy is Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) which explicitly provide medication to small tumours like the symptoms of esophageal cancer and non-small cell lung cancer.
However, this therapy causes minimal damage to the tissues as activating light is concentrated on the tumour. But most photosensitisers cannot penetrate through more than about 1/3rd of an inch of the tissues. As a result, this therapy is less effective and generally cannot be used to treat cancer that has spread.
To overcome this constraint, Steven Lopez, an assistant professor of Chemistry at Northeastern University, is researching ways to expand this treatment by fastening quantum mechanical and artificial intelligence that can acknowledge to red or near-infrared light and can penetrate deeper into the cells.
Steven Lopez says, “Visible light can only penetrate several millimetres into your tissues. We’re searching for new drugs that can absorb lower-energy light to treat larger tumours and those in currently inaccessible regions of the body.”
To annihilate the side effects of this therapy, Lopez and his team are working with Kebotex, a start-up company in Cambridge specialising in producing new electronic materials. They are using machine learning algorithms and calculations to examine every potential molecule for every possible drug candidate through lab experiments. Kebotex will hire the best data scientists and split this project into two which will diminish the time.
These researchers are aiming to discover those molecules which won’t affect in their base state but when they will be injected into the body it will hit with red or infrared light, absorb energy, and will be transported to nearby oxygen molecules and come in excited state. The singlet oxygen or the excited state is toxic in nature but is short-lived. Therefore, it won’t affect healthy cells but only target the cancerous cells as these oxygen molecules will rapidly come to the original state.
If this technique is implemented successfully, the dream of the researchers to replace chemotherapy with photodynamic therapy (PDT) will be a divine blessing for patients with malignant pathogens.
Shweta Tripathi
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