NCI uses nanotech to find molecular signatures

Everything is pointing to nanotechnology in medicine, including on the cancer front:

Wired Magazine covers nanotechnology and cancer. It states that "the National Cancer Institute, which recently announced two waves of funding for nanotech training and research, sees nanotechnology as vital to its stated goal of 'eliminating suffering and death from cancer by 2015.'"

Wired continues with, "The first cancer nanotech applications will likely involve detection. Nanoparticles could recognize cancer's molecular signatures, gathering the proteins produced by cancerous cells or signaling the presence of telltale genetic changes. Researchers have already used a protein called albumin -- considered a naturally occurring nanoparticle -- to detect proteins found in ovarian cancer tissue. Other nanoparticles could adhere to cancerous cells and, when viewed under a magnetic resonance imager or fluorescent light, reveal cancers now hidden to our eyes. How soon these cancer nanotechnologies will be commercially available is hard to guess. Though the NCI's Cancer Nanotechnology Plan calls for clinical trials on out-of-body applications within three years, and trials on in-body therapies and diagnostics within five years, researchers are cautious about promising too much."