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Former Community Member
1 minute read time.
It was World Health Day last Friday. Which got us thinking about what remains one of the most common killers. With many high-profile media campaigns over the past few years, there’s less stigma in talking about the “C-word”, but the facts remain stark: cancer survival is still talked about in terms of 3-5 years. Complete remission is for the lucky few.

New treatments have been developed, but the majority are still taken in forms that flood the whole system, often producing the horrific and visible side-effects that we see in so many cancer patients. But how about another idea: what if we could deliver the medicine directly to the treatment site and deploy it there?


That’s what you can hear more about on 4 May, in the first of the new EngTalks series. Professor Eleanor Stride’s work with microbubbles is based around the idea of encapsulating drugs in microscopic particles to temporarily deactivate them.


Talking about how she’s designing ‘stimuli-responsive’ particles to be responsive to light, pressure, or a particular chemical, she’ll explain how it’s possible to achieve ‘on demand’ release at a target site, promote uptake of the drug in target cells and reduce the risk of side effects.


EngTalks will also feature a 10-minute insight from Jack Kreindler, founder of the Centre for Health and Human Performance. Is a dollar a day all it takes for us to live to 100?


There’s also the chance to see a range of interactive displays from companies at the cutting edge of cancer treatment. We’re pleased to be welcoming Cancer Research UK, 3P Innovation and Hobbs Rehabilitation – with lots more still to be announced!


Tickets for EngTalks are free but you’ll need to pre-book to secure one! Book yours today at www.theiet.org/engtalks




 
  • In my field of research in ultra-high voltage physics, simulation models all assume a single primary mechanism.
    This mechanism might very well be relevant to the origins of some cases of cancer .
    Being so fundamental to our theories, most researchers take this mechanism for granted and more or less forget its existence and significance.
    Also, being so far removed from the field of biology, specialists rarely note the possible link.
    I would like to share these thoughts with you very briefly, in the hope that they may be of use, or at least might stimulate some fruitful debate.
    Résumé: Our bodies are being permanently bombarded by cosmic particles, and the earth’s natural radiation. These might break chemical bonds in our body tissues.

     
    Lightning, sparking and all sorts of electrical breakdown in air and gasses only occur because free electrons are incessantly being produced in the air around us.
    As all specialists know, these electrons are created by ionising reactions.
    This occurs in particular when high energy protons, entering the atmosphere from space, collide with air molecules and/or due to interactions with the earth’s naturel radiation.
    The level of such occurrences is low.
    The number of such ionising reactions in each cubic centimetre of atmospheric air is accepted to be in the region of 10 per second.
    Ionisation reactions of this sort take place even inside steel vessels, indicating à considerable penetration depth.
    The obvious implication is that our bodies, and everything else on earth, receive an identical flux of potentially ionising impacts.
    It is reasonable therefore, to assume that ionising reactions and bond breaking are permanently occurring inside our bodies.
    In high voltage applications, any freed electrons are immediately drawn away from the host atom/molecule, by the electrical forces.
    This of course is not the case inside our bodies.
    However, given the sheer number of reactions involved, (300 million / year/ cm3) it seems inevitable that bond breaking in ADN must occur occasionally.
    Could this, in some cases eventually lead to cancer, in a similar fashion to exposure to the suns’ UV radiation, to X-rays or to nuclear radiation ?
    It has been investigated related to the effects on astronauts during space travel,
    If this were proved to be true, there would be nothing one could do to avoid such occurrences.
    In such a scenario, anyone, anywhere could develop a cancer of any part of his body at any time in his life.
    Life style, heredity, age or nationality, would have absolutely little statistical bearing on this segment.
    In the absence of data, I have simply assumed that the number of ionisation mechanisms per unit of volume, produced in body tissue, is identical to those in atmospheric air.
    This is naturally incorrect, due to the higher density of body tissues, and it is probable that the number of impacts is much higher than in air.
    However, the expected damage, or absence of it, depends on the depth of penetration into body tissue and this depends on the energy of the incoming particles, 30MeV = ~1cm,   110MeV = ~10cm.

     
    Dr Stephen William ROWE CEng FIET FSEE.

     

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