A cure for cancer has been one of modern medicines biggest dreams for far too long, but there’s new hope that it’s not far off, thanks to nanotechnology.

Doctors and scientists in a university study have found that cancer cells treated with carbon nanotubes can be destroyed by non-invasive radio waves that heat up the nanotubes while sparing untreated tissue. The fact that most cancer treatments destroy cancer cells as well as the body’s healthy cells, is one that medicine has been trying to overcome for quite some time.

While not yet being tested on humans, researchers show that the technique completely destroyed liver cancer tumors in rabbits. There were no side effects noted. However, some healthy liver tissue within 2-5 millimeters of the tumors sustained heat damage due to nanotube leakage from the tumor.

“These are promising, even exciting, preclinical results in this liver cancer model,” says senior author Steven Curley, M.D., professor at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center’s Department of Surgical Oncology. “Our next step is to look at ways to more precisely target the nanotubes so they attach to, and are taken up by, cancer cells while avoiding normal tissue.”

Targeting the nanotubes solely to cancer cells is the major challenge in advancing the therapy, Curley says. Research is under way to bind the nanotubes to antibodies, peptides or other agents that in turn target molecules expressed on cancer cells. To complicate matters, most such molecules also are expressed in normal tissue.

Curley estimates that a clinical trial is at least three to four years away.

The research at M. D. Anderson was done in collaboration with nanotechnology experts at Rice University and with Erie, Pennsylvania, entrepreneur John Kanzius of ThermMed LLC, who invented the experimental radiofrequency generator used in the experiments. Kanzius is a cancer survivor and former radio station owner whose insights into the potential of targeted radio waves inspired this line of research.

At Rice, the work was begun by Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, several months before his untimely death from cancer in October 2005. Smalley was the founder of Rice’s Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory and one of the world’s foremost experts on carbon nanotubes. He shared the Nobel Prize for the 1985 discovery of fullerenes, the family of carbon molecules that includes nanotubes. His research in 2005 was concentrated largely on the radiofrequency cancer research project.

“I’m humbled by the results of this research,” says Kanzius. “I realize it’s early in the race, but Dr. Curley and his team have moved on this carefully with utmost speed. I look forward to continuing to work with them and hopefully to watching the first person be treated with this procedure. The race isn’t over but it needs to be taken to the finish line.”

Radiofrequency energy fields penetrate deeply into tissue, so it would be possible to deliver heat anywhere in the body if targeted nanotubes or other nanoparticles can be delivered to cancerous cells, Curley says. Without such a target, radio waves will pass harmlessly through the body.

This research appeared online ahead of December publication in the journal Cancer.