Breakthrough: Nanoparticle Eats Plaque Responsible for Heart Attacks

this video was brought to you by audible hi welcome to the third cold fusion episode for this week last time we took a look at tesla's announcements for a 25 000 car and improved battery technology and manufacturing but today we're going to look at something completely different in a stanford school of medicine study a drug coded carbon nanotube reduced plaque buildup in mice arteries without causing harmful side effects so you might be thinking so what who cares well this is probably why you should cardiovascular disease is the world's leading cause of death with almost 18 million people each year dying from it it accounts for a third of all deaths and one-third of these deaths occur prematurely in people under 70. in fact the frequency of this disease is a hundred percent in people over 65 it's just a matter of severity the disease can start from childhood and can be silently building for decades so this story is important to everyone in this episode we're going to take a look at some new research out of stanford that uses carbon nanotubes to solve this problem it's super interesting stuff so let's take a look you are watching cole fusion tv [Music] arthrosclerosis which leads to cardiovascular disease and other diseases is caused by the buildup of fats calcium cholesterol which is a waxy substance within the blood and other materials building up in and on your artery walls this mass is called plaque in some cases the plaque can burst triggering a blood clot strokes heart attacks organ failures and a whole host of problems can occur from the buildup of plaque in our arteries the exact cause of the disease is unknown the risk factors include high cholesterol levels diabetes obesity and an unhealthy diet so after understanding these facts it's a reminder to look after yourself i know it was to me the treatment of the established disease may include medications to lower cholesterol or blood thinners such as aspirin but for late stage patients this has only a limited efficacy a lot of medical treatments often focus on alleviating the symptoms but don't do much to get at the underlying problem although treatments are getting better they target the risk factors but don't treat the accumulation of disease cells and inflammation with within artery walls newer treatments have come about that suppress the plaque buildup by using antibodies these antibody treatments cause problems by clearing healthy tissue as well which leads to complications in other words these new methods aren't precise enough for the job it's a tricky issue and it's time for some new thinking for this problem what if there was something that had the potential to stop the disease and even reverse the plaque buildup the solution may lie in an unexpected place carbon nanotubes [Music] when people mention carbon nanotubes images of some crazy material from a marvel comic or something spring to mind but the thing is it basically is there it's a remarkable material they're essentially rolled up sheets of graphene a single layer of carbon atoms thick just rolled up into a tube so it has all the amazing properties of graphene just in tube form carbon nanotubes were discovered all the way back in 1993 by two independent research teams recently carbon nanotubes have been experiencing a surprisingly strong interest in the medical field for the purposes of drug delivery unlike conventional drugs they can target very specific cells and regions without having the side effect of harming healthy cells so here's how it works firstly the issue with plaque is that the problematic cells within the artery give off a don't destroy me signal this signal stops the immune system's waste removal cells from destroying them we'll call this signal a cloaking signal because it's easier to think of the problematic cells as hiding interestingly that same signal is found on the surface of many types of cancers allowing them to escape detection and multiply so here comes the solution researchers first developed a nanotube about two to three nanometers in diameter for reference a nanometer is about the size of a dna or a thousand times smaller than a bacteria or one hundred thousand times thinner than the width of a sheet of paper these tiny nanotubes were then modified in a solution to make them biocompatible and finally they were bonded with special dye so that they could be tracked and their location measured the nanotubes were then loaded with a molecule that turns off that pesky cloaking signal this is all shown here in figure 1b the red cy 5.5 is the dye that makes the nanotubes visible the shp1i is the molecule that turns off the cloaking signal it's pretty cool right unlike the existing antibody treatments these nanotubes were taken up by white blood cells the white blood cells naturally end up in inflammatory sites such as artery plaque once they were inside the plaque the white blood cells now recognized the problematic cells and destroyed them we'll discuss the promising results of the study in a bit dr smith one of the authors of the paper explains quote we found that we could stimulate the macrophages and just a note that means destroy cells or white blood cells in our case two selectively eat dead cells and dying cells these inflammatory cells are the precursor cells to atherosclerosis that just means the plaque buildup in the arteries that are part of the cause of heart attacks so basically the drug carried by the nanotubes shuts off the cloaking signal so the white blood cells can recognize that it should spring into action and get rid of the problematic cells which are the dead cells in cell debris the kind of cells that make up the core of plaque deposits as the study states once the cloaking mechanism is shut off the white blood cells quote cause the plaques to eat themselves from the inside out thus reducing their size and stabilizing their growth end quote it's almost like giving the body a nudge to fight against plaque buildup in arteries which it usually would ignore so here are the results the researchers found that the nanotherapy reduced plaque by 40 in both male and female mice with less advanced plaque buildup and it reduced plaque by 20 in mice with advanced plaque buildup you can see that here in this image what you're looking at here is a cross-section of an artery on the left is the control group with nanotubes containing just the dye and on the right is nanotubes that include the molecule that inhibits the cloaking signal the researchers discuss more quote because the white blood cells that took the nanotubes went to artery plaque rather than healthy tissue the nanotherapy avoided side effects such as organ damage we were able to constrain the uptake into just the cells we want there's a general rule of treatment the more targeted you get the fewer side effects you have it's an exciting development not only for cardiovascular disease but also for cancer the study also found quote minimal to no accumulation in the healthy aorta bone marrow heart lung gut fat muscle and kidneys end quote i think that's a good sign the authors call these results a key translational barrier for this class of drugs the researchers add quote but best of all we didn't see any significant toxicities interestingly carbon nanotubes have also proved safe and don't cause the immune system to go crazy in primates so eventually the idea is that a solution containing the nanoparticles will be iv injected into a patient and then will flow through their bloodstream before we continue i just want to thank this episode sponsor audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audiobooks ranging from best sellers news business and self-development if you're busy and don't have time to sit and read audible is a great way to enjoy content while you're doing something else and even if you just need to relax before bed it's a great way to stay entertained or learn knowledge speaking of which my book new thinking which covers the story of humanity through the lens of technology is available on audible from the steam engine to nikola tesla to the iphone and artificial intelligence new thinking is the story of what drove the inventors of our modern world to do what they did and how all of their contributions link together new thinking is rated the ninth best book on technology history by book authority after listening to it you'll be able to look around you and understand how pretty much everything came to be if you want to listen to new thinking or any other audio books go to audible.com cold fusion or text cold fusion to 500 500 for a 30-day free trial right so where were we yeah scientists loaded carbon nanotubes with an anti-cloaking molecule that makes artery plaque eat itself so how did they attach the drug that switches off the cloaking mechanism to the carbon nanotube well it was done via a process called pie stacking as depicted here interestingly there is some control over how aggressively you want the drug to be delivered the larger the diameter the stronger the attachment of the molecule to the carbon nanotube this method was first used in 2007 so i had a question when i was first looking into the therapy i asked myself well this is all well and good but what happens to the nanotubes once they've done their job do they just float around forever well as it turns out other studies have revealed that carbon nanotubes are eliminated by immune cells in a matter of weeks these experiments which are cited by the stanford study were carried out in 2010 and 2016 respectively so i think this is also very exciting and could save a lot of people from an early death but these are very early days and we should be cautiously optimistic but seeing that this disease is the number one killer on the planet i'm still very encouraged by such preliminary research i'm interested to know your thoughts especially those of you who have been diagnosed with a vascular condition let me know in the comments if you want to see a similar video on nanotherapy that kills cancer i'll leave a link to that video below so that's just about it for me if you do want to see anything on science technology business or history definitely subscribe to cold fusion you will get to see some interesting topics like this one and many others anyway my name is tagogo and you've been watching cold fusion and i'll see you again next week for the next episode next time we'll be taking a look at the history of adobe software did you know that in 1993 one of the co-founders was kidnapped at gunpoint it's an interesting story so stay tuned for that one cheers guys have a good one [Music] cold fusion it's me thinking you

Channel: ColdFusion

Views: 704,547

Rating: 4.9566913 out of 5

Keywords: Coldfusion, TV, Dagogo, Altraide, Technology, Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Tesla

Id: TNfYzima37c

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/4-ho-bert]

Great! We can keep smoking and eating shit like fast-food like there is no tomorrow!

[u/Dragondeaths]

Great. Only another decade or so before we even hear about it again.

[u/so2017]

This is like every Star Trek Voyager episode after 7 of 9 joins the cast.

[u/Crazycanuckeh]

Let’s also allow them to replicate and hope they don’t take over the world

[u/ten-million]

I wonder if people/mice are more susceptible to plaque ruptures during treatment. Maybe this will be a hospital procedure. Seems better than a stent which is what I had to have.

[u/OliverSparrow]

The paper from which this turgid video was taken is here. The magic bullet is a chemical inhibitor of the anti-phagocytic CD47-SIRPαsignaling axis. The things may even be preventative:

Single-cell RNA sequencing analysis reveals that pro-phagocytic SWNTs decrease the expression of inflammatory genes linked to cytokine and chemokine pathways in lesional macrophages, demonstrating the potential of Trojan horse nanoparticles to prevent atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

[u/steven_hydde]

Fix the key problem instead of trying to fix consequences

[u/mancer187]

Gonna be needing this for sure. Atherosclerosis has been killing humans since well forever.

[u/jusbokei]

I think this is great. In the meantime however, which will be quite sometime, people should eat their greens and limit the cakes.