Today the L.A. Times publishes a fascinating article on John Kanzius, a leukemia sufferer and radio man who, after spending years both experiencing grueling chemotherapy treatments and watching it in others, applied his talent for building radios to create a possible alternate treatment method. Kanzius had worked as a radio and television engineer and co-owned stations in the Erie, Pa. area, but he had no medical background — he didn't even have a bachelor's degree.
Kanzius knew how to send radio wave signals around the world. If he could transmit them into cancer cells, he wondered, could he then direct the radio waves to destroy tumors, while leaving healthy cells intact? For months, Kanzius tinkered, using the pie pans to create an electronic circuit, often waking Marianne with his clanging. By day, he sent her out with supply lists: mineral mixtures, metals, wires. His early-morning experiments would lead him to one of the nation's top cancer researcher centers, and earn the support of a Nobel Prize winner.
He knew that metal would heat when exposed to radio waves. He wanted to focus the waves by inserting metal particles into tumors. The infused cells would be placed in a radio frequency field. The waves would pass through the human body, and the particles injected into the cancer would heat and kill the cells without harming anything else.
Weary and weak, he tested his machine with hot dogs, then liver, then steak. He injected minerals into the meat and placed the slabs into his machine. To his delight, the injected portions of meat burned. But would it work on people?
Kanzius has worked on his radio cancer treatment since 2003, and he's beaten cancer several times only to see it come back each time. But as the years progressed, his ideas started to gain traction in the medical world. Eventually, researchers at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston got on board, as did Nobel Prize-winning nanoscience researcher Richard Smalley, of Rice University.
Curley said the treatment is the most promising he has ever seen because it has the potential to kill cancer -- without invasive treatment or surgery -- that doctors currently have no way of detecting. The next step for scientists is to perfect a method of binding nanoparticles with antibodies that, when introduced into the bloodstream, will attach only to cancer cells while avoiding normal cells. He said the treatment could work on any kind of cancer, and he estimates clinical trials are three to four years away.
"Possible?" Curley said. "Yes. Not simple."
In June, scientists submitted manuscripts based on the findings to journals. Three months later, Curley called Kanzius with news: The manuscripts, with Kanzius listed as a co-author, would be published in December in Cancer, an oncology medical journal. The results appeared online last week.
Kanzius is currently fighting another bout with cancer and may not live to receive the treatment he helped develop, but his innovations have the potential to help countless others. It's a pretty remarkable story of DIY science breaking out of the basement to shake the foundations of conventional medicine.
Sending his cancer a signal (Los Angeles Times, subscription required)
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