{"id":6252,"date":"2019-08-19T11:05:52","date_gmt":"2019-08-19T15:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/?p=6252"},"modified":"2019-10-15T10:53:16","modified_gmt":"2019-10-15T14:53:16","slug":"physics-professor-michael-antosh-leading-innovative-cancer-therapy-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/news\/physics-professor-michael-antosh-leading-innovative-cancer-therapy-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Physics professor Michael Antosh leading innovative research on radiation therapy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around the year 3000 BCE, an ancient Egyptian trauma surgery textbook now called the Edwin Smith Papyrus identified the first eight recorded cases of tumors in known history. Skip a few millennia, and a Greek physician by the name of Hippocrates gave these tumors the name <\/span>carcinos <\/span><\/i>or <\/span>carcinoma<\/span><\/i>, deriving from the word for \u201ccrab\u201d due to the tumors\u2019 leg-like protrusions. The history of the disease we\u2019ve come to know as cancer is a long and deadly one (as that Egyptian textbook put it: \u201cThere is no treatment\u201d). It\u2019s true that the study of cancer is an ever-evolving one, with new discoveries and fallbacks happening on a frequent basis. While the cancer death in the United States rate has decreased 27% in the past 25 years, the American Cancer Society still predicted at the beginning of 2019 that there would be \u201ca total of 1,762,450 new cancer cases and 606,880 deaths\u201d nationwide. Biologists, chemists, and physicists alike have been working nonstop over the years to bring that number even lower, including URI\u2019s own Michael Antosh.<\/span><\/p>\n

Antosh is an assistant professor of physics at URI and the director of the medical physics master\u2019s program, which, as he puts it, \u201coffers training to people who are looking to work with radiation therapy for cancer or medical imaging.\u201d That said, his main concentration is radiation and the application of physics in biology, and, during the time when he\u2019s not teaching physics courses or managing recitations, Antosh can be found working in his lab with Ph.D. and undergraduate students making improvements to cancer treatment. His latest work started with nanoparticles invented by Dr. Wei Chen at the University of Texas at Arlington called copper-cysteamine nanoparticles. \u201cThese nanoparticles give off free radicals,” he explains, “when they interact with radiation. Free radicals are chemicals that cause damage when they interact with nearby objects.\u201d In fact, according to the Maurer Foundation, free radicals are highly reactive molecules, their instability stemming from their possession of unpaired electrons, thus driving them to seek out and \u201csteal\u201d electrons from nearby molecules. Their ravenous trek through the body is what causes the damage Antosh refers to, leading to ailments such as Alzheimer\u2019s disease, Parkinson\u2019s, and, yes, cancer.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Viewing the copper-cysteamine nanoparticles as a means to a scientific breakthrough in the field of cancer therapy, Antosh led an experiment to test its effectiveness. \u201cThe goal of the experiments is to test a nanoparticle that could potentially make radiation therapy more effective at killing cancer,\u201d he explains, as there are risks involved with radiation therapy. \u201cGiving tumors radiation is very harmful to cancer cells, but it\u2019s impossible to do radiation therapy without also causing some damage to healthy tissue,\u201d he states, \u201cHealthy tissue is damaged because radiation is made up of photons that interact at different depths, with different probabilities for each depth. If you can make radiation more effective on cancer, you could use less radiation overall and cause less damage to healthy tissue.\u201d <\/p>\n

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The main experiment, conducted by Antosh\u2019s students Samana Shrestha, Bindeshwar Sah, and Adam Vanasse, was executed by injecting the nanoparticles into tumors found in mice. They then irradiated the tumors, in turn measuring their size for several weeks after. \u201cThe work itself takes a long time,” he says, “even after every mouse is treated with radiation therapy, there are lots of tumor size measurements to do almost every day. The main result was that these nanoparticles can be used as part of a strategy to make radiation therapy more effective at killing cancer.\u201d But what does this mean for the greater scientific community as a whole? \u201cMore work is needed, but it\u2019s possible that the copper-cysteamine nanoparticles could eventually become a new material for making radiation therapy work better in humans,\u201d Antosh states, \u201cThat\u2019s definitely the goal.\u201d His findings have been recorded in a paper published on August 1, 2019, in <\/span>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/span><\/i> as a team effort between his lab, Dr. Wei Chen\u2019s lab at UTA, Dr. Jing Wu of URI\u2019s Statistics department, and Dr. Leon Cooper of Brown University. The search for the cure to cancer may be thousands of years in the making, but, thanks to Antosh and those in his field, a possible remedy might be closer than ever before.<\/span><\/p>\n

~Written by Chase Hoffman, Writing and Rhetoric and Anthropology double major<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Antosh, assistant professor of physics, is hoping to improve cancer treatments through research on the use on nanoparticles to enhance radiation therapy and ultimately make it more effective at eradicating cancer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1089,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[252,100],"class_list":["post-6252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-medical-physics","tag-physics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6252"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6757,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6252\/revisions\/6757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}