Nanosurgery in Montréal (Canada)

When I was typing up charts for home nursing care (nurses visiting patients in their home after a hospital procedure), I routinely asked if a patient whose cancer had metastasized would require palliative care even though the answer would be yes. In over 3 years and after hundreds of charts, I only had one ‘No’. So it is with some interest I read about Michel Meunier and his team’s work at the Polytechnique Montréal (Québec, Canada). From the Feb. 16, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

The unique method developed by Professor Michel Meunier and his team uses a femtosecond laser (a laser with ultra-short pulses) along with gold nanoparticles. Deposited on the cells, these nanoparticles concentrate the laser’s energy and make it possible to perform nanometric-scale surgery in an extremely precise and non-invasive fashion. The technique allows to change the expression of genes in the cancer cells and could be used to slow their migration and prevent the formation of metastases.

The technique perfected by Professor Meunier and his colleagues is a promising alternative to conventional cellular transfection methods, such as lipofection. The experiment, carried out in Montréal laboratories on malignant human melanoma cells, demonstrated 70% optoporation effectiveness, as well as a transfection performance three times higher than lipofection treatment. In addition, unlike conventional treatment, which destroys the physical integrity of the cells, the new method assures cellular viability, with a toxicity of less than 1%.

The Polytechnique’s Feb. 16, 2012 press release is here and you can find out more about Meunier and his lab here (in English and en français). For those eager to read the article, it was published in Biomaterials (vol. 33, no. 7, March 2012, pp. 2345-50) is titled, Off-resonance plasmonic enhanced femtosecond laser optoporation and transfection of cancer cells and is behind a paywall.

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