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In Medicine, Small is About To Become Big
By Stephen Heuser, The Boston Globe, May 8, 2006
In a darkened conference room, at the country’s largest gathering of biotech executives, the slides clicked onto the screen with as much punch and drama as a black-and-white micrograph can pack.
In the first frame, highly magnified cancer cells appeared, surrounded by tiny black dots. In the second frame, cells were gone — dissolved into a mass of goo.
The tiny black dots were manmade particles that hunt down cancer cells and perch around their edges. The particles start heating up when hit with a powerful magnetic field. The effect on a cancer cell is not unlike that of a hammer on a water balloon.
“People think it’s unbelievable that such a technology exists,” said Samuel Straface, who had shown the slides only to a handful of potential investors before presenting them at the Biotech Industry Organization conference last month.
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