Nanoparticles and Lasers Create CancerKilling Microbubbles: "Reporting their work in the journal Lasers in Surgery and Medicine, Dmitri Lapotko, Ph.D., from the Luikov Heath and Mass Transfer Institute in Minsk, Belarus, and colleagues used antibody-targeted gold nanoclusters to selectively destroy leukemia cells present in human bone marrow samples. To achieve optimal targeting, the investigators used a two-stage labeling technique.

In the first stage, they used diagnosis-specific monoclonal antibodies, that is, the antibodies used by clinical laboratories to diagnose specific subsets of acute B-lymphoblast leukemia (ALL) in human patients, to label the malignant cells. This type-specific antibody serves as the target for the second monoclonal antibody, which is attached to the gold nanoparticles. "