Scientists find surprising way to destroy 99% of cancer cells: What you need to know

Cancer is among the biggest killers and in 2022, around 9.7 million people died due to the deadly disease. Ongoing research continues to advance treatments, with breakthroughs in immunotherapy, targeted drugs, and early detection methods offering new hope in the fight against this deadly disease.
Now a team of scientists from Rice University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas have found out an innovative way to destroy cancer cells with near-infrared light which could kill around 99% of cancer cells.
A study published last year in Nature Chemistry has found that stimulating

aminocyanine molecules

with near-infrared light caused them to vibrate in sync, which could break apart the membranes of the cancer cells. Aminocyanine molecules aren’t new to the game and are already used in bioimaging as synthetic dyes. They are usually used in low doses to detect cancer, stay stable in water and are very good at attaching themselves to the outside of cells.
The scientists said their approach is even better than another kind of cancer-killing molecular machine previously developed, called

Feringa-type motors

, which is capable of breaking the structures of problematic cells.

“It is a whole new generation of molecular machines that we call molecular jackhammers,” said chemist James Tour from Rice University, when the results were published in December 2023.
“They are more than one million times faster in their mechanical motion than the former Feringa-type motors, and they can be activated with near-infrared light rather than visible light.”
The near-infrared light allows scientists to get deeper into the body which can help treatment of cancer in bones and organs without the need of surgery to get to the cancer growth.

The researchers experimented on lab-grown cancer cells and got a 99 per cent success rate in destroying cancer cells. Further, in an encouraging development, the technique also worked on mice with melanoma tumors, as half of them got cancer-free.
“This is the first time a molecular plasmon is utilized in this way to excite the whole molecule and to actually produce mechanical action used to achieve a particular goal – in this case, tearing apart cancer cells’ membrane,” said chemist Ciceron Ayala-Orozco from Rice University.
“This study is about a different way to treat cancer using mechanical forces at the molecular scale,” said Ayala-Orozco.