Vegetable flavonoid promising for cancer treatment

I remember wondering a while back why I loved green beans so much when they didn't appear to have an especially high food value/nutrition. A few years ago I was excited to learn that green beans, in fact, contain something called flavonoids (a recently discovered nutrient) that were really good for you. Hurray, I thought. My body's wisdom does work after all.

Today I found this on the value of flavonoids as tools in sensitizing cancer cells--but not healthy ones--so that they will react more intensely to standard cancer treatments such as chemo and radiation.

Researchers are talking about trying to synthesize this element and use it in stronger doses to further boost cancer cell death. Now that's one of my favorite topics--taking advantage of nature's wisdom.

Nanostructures like Diamonds can deliver cancer drugs precisely

Nano looks like it may provide a newly precise way of aiming only at cancer cells and avoiding inflammation, thus leaving healthy cells in their natural state. Nanoengineers Mine Tiny Diamonds For Drug Delivery. Fascinating to learn that these "diamonds," which are structurally not unlike their namesake minerals, are welcomed by cells because they are so carefully organized. When cells welcome a substance, according to this report, they tend not to go haywire and express it with inflammation. Hmmm. Seems like a big useful clue in that statement for future researchers.

The technique here is to cluster several nanodiamonds together, apply the drug to the surfaces (which allows more drug to be used than with the spherical nanoparticles currently used), deliver it to the cancer site, and there let it break up--which then releases the drug.

They've even found that they can deliver nanodiamonds (without drugs) into the body and no harm comes to surrounding cells. These new guys could become the next-generation stem-cell-type magic.