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Cancer — A person’s presence could decrease the life out of a place in a variety of ways.
A person who is always negative, criticizing, or complaining, for example, may have a detrimental influence on the mood and morale of others around them.
Someone who is really worried or concerned may exude a tight or unpleasant energy that affects others.
Furthermore, someone who dominates talks or occupies a lot of physical space in a room may cause discomfort or suffocation for others.
These are only a few instances of how a person’s manner or conduct may change the mood in a room, and it’s important to be conscious of how our actions affect others around us.
While this may be upsetting for some, it is seen to be a brilliant concept if a battery can do the same for a tumor.
Batteries and tumors
A mouse analysis revealed that enclosing a tumor with a small self-charging battery may draw oxygen from the cancer cell’s surroundings, improving cancer therapy efficiency.
Researchers revealed in the March 31 edition of Science Advances that mice had tiny batteries wrapped around their breast cancer tumors.
When paired with cancer therapy, the tumor volume was reduced by 90% in two weeks.
Solid tumors, such as breast cancer, can grow faster than the blood supply can keep up.
Because of growth, the cores of many tumors may be hypoxic, having lower oxygen levels than the surrounding tissue.
Hypoxia
Yongyao Xia, a materials scientist at Shanghai’s Fudan University who studies battery materials, stated:
“Hypoxia is a double-edged sword.”
Low oxygen levels in tumors imply that the immune cells of the body are unable to live long enough to destroy the cancerous cells.
Furthermore, Fan Zhang, a biomedical materials researcher at Fudan University, observed that hypoxic cells are resistant to radiation and standard chemotherapies because there is insufficient blood flow to provide a lethal dosage.
In a new study, Xia and Zhang claim:
“On the other hand, it provides a target for precision treatment of tumors.”
Prodrugs
Hypoxia may function as a signaling molecule for hypoxia-activated prodrugs.
Chemotherapeutic medicines, according to Qin Zhang, a molecular scientist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, are coupled to a connecting molecule that assures the therapy is only active in low-oxygen environments.
In contrast, clinical studies of hypoxia-activated prodrugs revealed no advantages.
The researchers believe this is due to the fact that the solid tumors against which they were deployed were either not hypoxic or not hypoxic enough.
Xia and Fan Zhang wanted to develop a strategy to make tumors more hypoxic so that prodrugs could work better.
Read also: Fungus is spreading in the US and it’s immune to drugs
The batteries
The researchers and their colleagues used a small, flexible battery that could wrap around a tumor partly.
It charges itself with a zinc electrode by taking oxygen from its surroundings, producing highly reactive oxygen pairs that may damage DNA.
They are not, however, a viable source of oxygen for cells.
Two weeks after the battery was placed, the tumors in the mice shrank by around 26% of their original size.
It may achieve this by absorbing the great majority of available oxygen and creating a large number of reactive oxygen pairs.
Shrinking the tumor
The average tumor size was reduced by 90% when coupled with a hypoxia-activated prodrug.
“I think the concept, the scientific basis, is solid,” said Qin Zhang.
He also stated that, while the results are promising, they are still in their early phases.
The batteries were only tested on animals with mouse-specific breast cancer.
“It has to be tested in several breast cancer models and also has to be tested in other cancer models,” Zhang said, referring to humans.
He also stated that a 90% decrease in tumor size is not the same as a 100% decrease.
“There’s still 10 percent left,” he said.
If the cells survive, it might indicate that they are resistant to hypoxia, allowing the tumor to reappear.
Zhang went on to say that, like many other medicines, it would need to be coupled with others to guarantee complete tumor elimination.
Xia, Fan Zhang, and his colleagues are brainstorming methods to make the battery more flexible and powerful for human-sized tumors, employing battery energy to sucking air and starve cancer.
