A new battery creates a truly hostile environment. And since it’s trying to fight tumors, that’s exactly what scientists want.
, often grow rapidly — so rapidly that the tumor’s growth is faster than its blood supply can support . This means that the center of many tumors can be hypoxic, with much lower oxygen levels than surrounding tissue.
mean that the body’s immune cells often cannot survive long enough to kill the cancerous cells . Hypoxic cells are also resistant to treatments like radiotherapy and even to traditional chemotherapies, as there isn’t enough blood flow to deliver a deadly dose, explains Fudan’s Fan Zhang, who studies biomedical materials.
The hypoxia could act as a beacon for chemicals called hypoxia-activated prodrugs. These are chemotherapeutic drugs hooked to a linking chemical that ensures the drug becomes active only in a low-oxygen environment, says Qing Zhang, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who was not involved in the study.
So the researchers and their colleagues deployed a tiny, flexible battery that could partially wrap around a tumor. The battery’s zinc electrode self-charges by sucking up oxygen from the environment. It also creates highly reactive oxygen pairs that can damage DNA but aren’t a usable form of oxygen for cells.
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