Tag: electromagnetic fields

Categories : New Compounds and TreatmentsTags :

Harnessing Magnetic Fields to Produce Safer and Cheaper Medicines

On By ModernMedia
An image of ferrofluid reacting to a magnetic field. Photo by Etienne Desclides on Unsplash

By using magnetism to eliminate unwanted ‘mirror’ counterparts inherent to the production of certain medications, they could be made safer and produced more cheaply, according to new investigations underway at Texas A&M University.

Everyday drugs, such as ibuprofen, may have an inherent flaw in their molecular structure, pairing the active, beneficial ingredient with a potentially ineffective, or even toxic, ‘mirror’ counterpart, due to being of the wrong chirality, or structural twist. New research using electromagnetic fields could help keep the effective ingredients while eliminating the unwanted counterparts. Chirality is already an important consideration in the development of new drugs.

Dr. Shoufeng Lan, assistant professor in the J Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is leading a team investigating the use of electromagnetic control over the synthesis of chiral compounds — a technique which could open up a host of applications including in the pharmaceutical industry.

“Mysteriously, all living organisms on the Earth consist of only left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars, but not their mirrored counterparts,” Prof Lan said. “The phenomenon is the so-called homochirality of life and it is the ultimate form of asymmetric synthesis.”

Prof Lan gave the example of a human hand to demonstrate the concept of chirality, noting that if you created a mirror image of your hand, it could not be perfectly superimposed over the original.

By identifying a successful method of using asymmetrical synthesis to create new versions of structures for items like ibuprofen, Prof Lan said that improved versions of generic pharmaceuticals with reduced toxicity could be produced at a lower cost than currently available due to the current purification process.

However, to achieve success, the researchers will first need figure out how to implement this magnetic effect on asymmetric synthesis at practical temperatures. The effect is currently fairly weak, even using a powerful magnetic field or at a temperature as low as -268°C.

Prof Lan noted that the 2001 Nobel Prize in chemistry’s topic was addressing chirality, which uses an existing chiral object—a catalyst molecule—to transfer chirality to the desired mirror image form as the final product.

“This Nature Communications paper demonstrated a giant atomic-scale magneto-chiral effect that is orders of magnitude stronger,” Prof Lan said. “By applying this effect, it is arguably possible to master an asymmetric synthesis or asymmetric self-assembling.”

Prof Lan said his team’s research could revolutionise the field by creating a new iteration of biomedical, chemical and pharmaceutical applications. For example, by asymmetrically synthesising only the active component of racemic Lexapro (the most common medication in the US with more than 25 million prescriptions) the research might reduce the drug’s side effects.

“We anticipate that our demonstration could lead to the creation of chiral seeds at the atomic scale,” Prof Lan said. “Upon them, we hope to transfer the chirality using cutting-edge technologies, such as a metal-organic framework, to create chiral materials from nanoscales to macroscales.”

Source: Phys.org

Journal information: Shoufeng Lan et al, Observation of strong excitonic magneto-chiral anisotropy in twisted bilayer van der Waals crystals, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22412-9

Categories : CancerTags :

Electromagnetic Fields Could Inhibit Breast Cancer Cell Spread

On By ModernMedia

A new study has shown that electrical fields can slow, and in some cases halt, the spread of breast cancer cells through the body.

The research also found how electromagnetic fields (EMFs) have the ability to hinder the number of cancer cells that can spread. Pulsed EMFs have also been shown to have some effectiveness in pain management, and low level EMFs were shown also to reduce blood glucose in animal models, a possible first step to treating diabetes.

“We think we can hinder metastasis by applying these fields, but we also think it may be possible to even destroy tumours using this approach,” said senior author Vish Subramaniam, former professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University. Subramaniam retired from Ohio State in December.

“That is unclear at this stage, but we are working on understanding that – how big should the electromagnetic field be, how close should it be to the tumour? Those are the next questions we hope to answer,” he said.
Subramaniam said that this had the effect of the EMF is to slow down some of the cancer cells. “It makes some of them stop for a little while before they start to move, slowly, again. As a group, they appear to have split up. So how quickly the whole group is moving and for how long they are moving becomes affected.”

The effect was applied to human cancer cells in vitro and has not been applied in humans.

The EMFs seem to selectively slow down the cancer cells’ metabolism by affecting the electrical fields inside the individual cells—completely noninvasively and without side effects like ionising radiation, which would mean a revolutionary form of cancer treatment if it could be made to work in practice. This ability to access a cell’s internal workings is new to the study of how cancer metastasises, said Prof  Subramaniam.

“Now that we know this, we can start to answer other questions, too,” Subramaniam said. “How do we affect the metabolism to the point that we not only make it not move but we choke it, we completely starve it. Or can we slow it down to the point where it will always remain weak?”

Source: News-Medical.Net

Journal information: Jones, T.H., et al. (2021) Directional Migration of Breast Cancer Cells Hindered by Induced Electric Fields May Be Due to Accompanying Alteration of Metabolic Activity. Bioelectricity. doi.org/10.1089/bioe.2020.0048.