(Press-News.org) Chemotherapy treatment usually involves the patient receiving medicine through an intravenous catheter. These catheters, as well as the the equipment attached to them, are treated with a silver coating which is antibacterial, preventing bacterial growth and unwanted infections during a treatment.
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Physics are now studying what happens when different drugs come in contact with this silver coating.
Silver breaks down chemotherapy drugs
"We wanted to find potential problem sources in the tubes used in intravenous catheters. An interaction between the coating and the drugs was one possibility. Chemotherapy drugs are active substances, so it isn't hard to imagine that the medicine could react with the silver," says Justin Wells, an associate professor of physics at NTNU.
Wells and his students used x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) to look at the surface chemistry of one of the most commonly used chemotherapy drugs, 5-Fluorouracil (5-Fu), and the interaction between it and the type of silver coating found in medical equipment.
Using an XPS instrument at the synchrotron lab MAX IV in Sweden, they found that the antibacterial silver coating actually breaks down the drugs. Not only does this reduce the effect of a chemotherapy treatment, but it also creates hydrogen fluoride, a gas that can be harmful both to the patients and to the medical equipment.
"Reactions between chemotherapy drugs and other substances that the drugs come in contact with have, as far as we know, never been studied like this before," Wells says. It has always been assumed that the drugs reach the body fully intact.
Magical material
The group continued their studies with the XPS instrument, now examining how the same chemotherapy drugs reacted with graphene.
"Graphene is a non-reactive substance, and is sometimes referred to as a magical material that can solve any problem. So we thought that it might be a good combination with the chemotherapy drugs," Wells explains.
And they were right-- the drugs did not react with the graphene.
Graphene has already been suggested as a coating for medical equipment, and according to researchers, it should be possible to create thin layers of graphene designed for this use.
"This research has produced valuable information about the interaction between chemotherapy drugs and other substances that the medicine is in contact with. We hope that our work will contribute to making cancer treatment more effective, and that we can continue our work in this area. We would like to study the reaction between chemotherapy drugs and other substances and coatings used on medical equipment," Wells concludes.
INFORMATION:
Reference: Graphene coatings for chemotherapy: avoiding silver-mediated degradation. Federico Mazzola, Thuat Trinh, Simon Cooil, Elise Ramleth Østli, Kristin Høydalsvik, Eirik Torbjørn Bakken Skjønsfjell, Signe Kjelstrup, Alexei Preobrajenski, Attilio A. Cafolla, D. Andrew Evans, Dag W. Breiby and Justin W.Wells. 2D Mater. 2 (2015) 025004. doi:10.1088/2053-1583/2/2/025004
This news release is available in German.
Although global concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has continuously increased over the past decade, the mean global surface temperature has not followed the same path. A team of international reseachers, KIT scientists among them, have now found an explanation for this slowing down in global warming: the incoming solar radiation in the years 2008-2011 was twice as much reflected by volcanic aerosol particles in the lowest part of the stratosphere than previously thought. The team presents their study ...
In a recent article in Nature, Keith Shepherd and the Land Health Decisions team at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), together with their external partners, propose a radically new method to the SDG community that would answer these questions. They call on the United Nations and private sector to dispense with the highly criticized target setting approach and adopt the new method of decision analysis.
The target setting approach is widely seen as ineffective or counter-productive. Targeting emphasizes meeting a 'target' rather than learning how to improve performance ...
The quality of waters can be assessed using of the organisms occurring therein. This approach often results in errors, because many species look alike. Therefore, new methods focus on DNA analyses instead. Biologists at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have optimised the process so that they are now able to identify many organisms at once in a quick and reliable manner using short DNA sequences. The results have been published in the PLOS ONE magazine.
Expert knowledge for species identification threatens to disappear
Industry, agriculture and human settlement ...
Researchers at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Infection and Global Health (IGH) have discovered a common cause of heart damage in patients with sepsis.
Sepsis is the most common cause of death in hospitalised critically ill people and affects up to 18 million people world-wide annually.
The electrical and mechanical malfunctions of the heart have been poorly understood in sepsis, with underdeveloped clinical management strategies, as a consequence. This new discovery, however, promises to benefit a high number of patients with heart failure or rhythm ...
Since 1994, researchers at Case Western Reserve University have studied mothers--some who used cocaine while pregnant and others who did not--to understand how the drug affected their children's cognitive and social development.
Their latest findings suggest a link between prenatal cocaine exposure and an adolescent's likelihood to have sexual intercourse before age 15.
Teens who were prenatally cocaine exposed (PCE) were 2.2 times more likely to engage in sexual intercourse before age 15 than those who weren't, yet how PCE affects early sexual behavior may differ ...
This news release is available in German.
Some pollinators not only provide fertilization services for flowering plants, they also lay their eggs on the plants' leaves after they have visited the flowers. Voracious caterpillars hatch from these eggs and their enormous appetite can easily kill the plants. So when plants advertise for pollinators they frequently also attract herbivores. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, demonstrated in field trials that the flowers of the coyote tobacco Nicotiana attenuata are able ...
AMES, Iowa - Developing any habit--good or bad--starts with a routine, and exercise is no exception. The trick is making exercise a habit that is hard to break. According to a new Iowa State University study, that may be easier to accomplish by focusing on cues that make going for a run or to the gym automatic.
Some interventions designed to help people start and continue exercising may focus on the execution habit, or an exact routine to follow at the gym, said Alison Phillips, an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State. However, Phillips' research, published ...
MANHATTAN, Kansas -- A new study led by a Kansas State University geneticist has shown that genomic signatures of adaptation in crop plants can help predict how crop varieties respond to stress from their environments.
It is the first study to document that these genomic signatures of adaptation can help identify plants that will do well under certain stresses, such drought or toxic soils, said Geoff Morris, assistant professor of agronomy at Kansas State University and a researcher affiliated with the university's Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research ...
Since their first discovery a generation ago, it has been recognized that hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the deep dark oceans represented unique habitats for exotic forms of life previously unknown to science. But what has gone quite overlooked, until now, is the role that these "rare, exotic" systems might play in regulating the global-scale chemistry of the oceans and, hence, the health and productivity of our planet as a whole.
A new study by researchers from University of Washington (UW), Old Dominion University (ODU), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), ...
Strategies to support healthier diets among seniors need to take into account differences between elderly men and women, according to UBC research.
The two groups had varying responses to a tactic thought to boost seniors' fruit and vegetable intake, according to a study published in Appetite.
The study explored which types of social support encouraged seniors to boost their daily intake of fruits and vegetables.
Social support, typically provided by friends and family, comes in different forms. It ranges from emotional support, which bolsters one's sense of self, ...
