Beaker Hill: Cancer Longboats, Rapid Heart Attack Detection

More MIT madness leads off this edition of Beaker Hill. We’re always thoroughly impressed by these Cantabridgian crusaders, not just for the intriguing work they put together, but also for the way completely off-the-wall concepts make perfect sense in their world.Take their new cancer-targeting system loosely modeled after a Viking longboat. No, it’s not a mashup of Beowulf and Fantastic Voyage (as entertaining as that would be) but a contraption out of the lab of Stephen Lippard. The system uses a carbon nanotube as the “boat,” which carries two passengers: a folate derivative used to target certain types of cancer cells, and the cancer-killing drug cisplatin. Once the boat reaches shore by virtue of the cancer cells’ folate receptors, the cisplatin is released to loot, pillage, and destroy everything in its wake. The Lippard team’s article can be found in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, along with a teaser for their next project: a Robespierre-inspired obesity targeting compound that slices through fat cells like a guillotine and screams, “Let them eat cake!”

Moving on from forced historical analogies, a group led by Robert Gertzen of Mass. General Hospital has developed a way to diagnose a heart attack within just 10 minutes. Typically, the tests used to detect a heart attack are only able to look for proteins released into the bloodstream hours after the event. Until diagnosis, the patient is not fully treatable, since doctors must refrain from using the most potent medications until it is confirmed that the heart attack actually took place. The new procedure was developed from treatments for a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (the suspected cause of Reggie Lewis' death in 1993) in which a controlled heart attack, similar to controlled burns in the case of wildfire, is necessary to kill off ailing heart tissue. Gertzen’s team looked at the characteristic molecules released during these controlled heart attacks and noticed a particular chemical signature, which was then found capable of diagnosing heart attacks in other patients with about 80% accuracy. Good enough for government work, if not quite for the hospital yet, and good enough for the Journal of Clinical Investigation, where the full results can be found.