Diamonds are not just forever, also helps detect early stage cancers: Sydney U researchers

The eternal stone that are women’s best friend are now also tools of the doctor to detect cancer. The new role of diamonds beyond making females pretty is keeping people live longer.

University of Sydney physicists discovered that new role when they found a way to make nanoscale, synthetic diamonds light up inside a Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine, in effect, acting as a beacon for cancer. This is possible by magnetising the atoms within the nano-diamonds and then attaching it to specific chemicals known to hit cancers, reports ABC.

The presence of cancer will attract the chemicals to the site, and the diamonds – injected into the body and monitored while moving through the body – serve as a lighthouse, explains Ewa Rej, lead author of the study.

Professor David Reilly, lead researcher, said the School of Physics researchers were aware that diamonds were of interest for being used to deliver drugs during chemotherapy because of its non-reactive and non-toxic nature. He adds, “We thought we could build on those non-toxic properties realising that diamonds have magnetic characteristics enabling them to act as beacons in MRIs. We effectively turned a pharmaceutical problem into a physics problem,” quotes Natureworldreport.

By seeing the cancers light up, there is no need to open up the patient, Reilly points out. The diamonds would be used to detect cancers hard to discover in their early stage, such as brain and pancreatic cancers, before it threatens the life of the patient.

But it would take a few years before it could be used on humans, although next week, the team would begin to test the technology on mice. The study was published on Sunday in Nature Communications.

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