Monday, April 30, 2012

How "Nano Gold" Could Revolutionize Biotech

As it turns out, gold is a natural-born killer of unhealthy human cells. It has distinct properties that make it ideal for linking medical science with the new field of nanotech.

The yellow metal will play a vital role in the Era of Radical Change, in which human beings routinely live healthy, productive lives well into our hundreds. And gold's growing use in both biotech and nanotech will greatly expand our chances to score big stock gains, too. A new kind of gold rush has started. And not only can you make money from it - it could also save the human race from the most deadly diseases.

By the end of this decade, gold will be used as a lethal weapon in the battle against a wide range of killer tumors. It has to do with so-called gold nanoparticles. The odds are good you've seen "nano gold" in the past but didn't even know it. Fact is, we've been putting these tiny specks of gold to use, in one form or another, for centuries. But they've only lately become a key tool for fighting disease and making new medical discoveries.

Take the recent breakthrough from a team at Stanford University.

Scientists there used nano gold to find and highlight aggressive forms of brain tumors. They used tiny gold spheres so small it boggles the mind - they measured less than five one-millionths of an inch in diameter. Each piece of nano gold was coated with an agent that allowed the tiny balls to be viewed with three different types of body imaging techniques.

In this test at Stanford, team members found they could see and remove tumors marked by nano gold from the brains of mice with the highest degree of accuracy reported to date.

Here's why that's so important.