Thanks to work by Shuming Nie, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the Emory-Georgia Tech Nanotechnology Center for Personalized and Predictive Oncology, gold nanoparticles look to be emerging as powerful tumor-homing beacons for detecting microscopic tumors or even individual malignant cells. Until now, the particles have been used mainly in rheumatoid arthritis research.Experiments show that the coated gold nanoparticles could serve as potent imaging agents for studies of cancer cells. Researchers injected the targeted nanoparticles into mice with head and neck carcinomas and obtained results within five hours. As control experiments, they injected matching mice with the untargeted nanoparticle. The unique optical spectra of the nanoparticles were easily detected in both sets of animals, but only the targeted nanoparticles accumulated in tumors.

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