🍄 Super Sonic Medicine

With healing frequencies and acoustic technology, is the future of oncology and other medical revelations riding the crest of a sound wave?

Aug 09, 2024

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Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Science has been fine-tuning frequencies and sound medicine since Hippocrates but has it finally hit its high note? Let’s make some noise for the science of sound—now bigger and better at understanding and manipulating cancer cell mechanics.

Sound medicine 2.0

The latest medical treatments from oncology to obesity and anxiety are ingestible, implantable and reach previously impenetrable places such as the blood-brain barrier. With a fresh toolkit of “molecular jackhammers” and “acoustic tweezers,” researchers have been able to study cancer cells in constructive new ways. Light and sound may also slow Alzheimer’s by making the brain remove toxins, according to new research from MIT. And Harvard engineers have created an illusionary sense of fullness with ingestible, vibrating capsules for obesity.

So a new frequency of healing is on the horizon—and it’s not coming quietly. Arriving to the tune of an estimated $33.6 billion by 2029, the global electroceuticals/bioelectric medicine market currently rings in at an estimated $23.9 billion. Electroceuticals, or bioelectric medicine generally means the therapeutic use of electrical stimulation to influence and modify biological functions or pathological responses in the body. Electroceuticals are defined as medical devices that provide neurostimulation for therapy, but it’s often used as a term to reference ultra-miniature or injectable implants.

“While acoustics has become commonplace for many medical applications, several potentially transformative acoustic technologies have been developed over the last decade,” reports Nature. “These exciting laboratory demonstrations are beginning to show their potential in clinical applications.”

The science of sound

The use of sound has a long history in medicine dating back to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates in 350 BC. Regarded as “the father of medicine,” Hippocrates devised a diagnostic method to detect fluid in the lungs by shaking patients’ shoulders and listening to the resulting sounds emanating from their chest. The 19th-century ushered in the stethoscope to gauge the health of the heart, and ultrasound imaging was introduced in 1942. Doctors could then diagnose conditions in the fields of obstetrics, emergency medicine, and cardiology and thus the field of biomedical imaging was revolutionized!

Acoustic show

And the beat goes on. “As acoustic technology has advanced, so too has our ability to ‘listen’ to the body and better understand underlying pathologies,” reports Nature. “21st-century inventions of photoacoustic imaging and photoacoustic microscopyhave led to significant advances in the ability to perform functional imaging, enabling doctors to not only visualize organs and tissues at high resolution but also gain insights into underlying biochemical activity.”

Acoustics and the science of sound is an old and established field, reports Wired. “Early technologies, dating back centuries, largely revolved around music, from building better acoustics for theaters to designing tuning forks. In the 20th century, people re-conceived sound as an imaging tool. Military researchers developed sonar to find enemy submarines, which medical engineers later adapted to image fetuses during pregnancy. People began to use sound to map spaces, whether they were in the ocean or in a human body.”

These days, engineers have taken a fresh perspective on sound—in analogy with light. “Sound, just like light, is a wave. Consequently, both exhibit many parallel phenomena: Your voice echoing in a canyon, for example, is mathematically analogous to light bouncing off a mirror. Over the last half-century, engineers have achieved unprecedented control over light, with inventions ranging from lasers to fiber optics to one-way mirrors to holograms. Now, engineers are adapting the tools for manipulating sound waves instead.”

A bigger buzz

The “molecular jackhammer” just hits different. It’s a technique using near-infrared light to tear cancer cells apart. How? Vibrations. A research team at Rice University, in Texas, stimulated aminocyanine molecules with near-infrared light, causing them to vibrate enough to rupture melanoma cells’ membrane. Aminocyanine molecules are already used in bioimaging as synthetic dyes, and often in low doses to detect cancer. They stay stable in water and are very good at attaching themselves to the outside of cells.

The team says it’s a marked improvement on an earlier cancer-killing molecular machine, called “Feringa-type motors,” which could also break the structure of dangerous cells. “It is a whole new generation of molecular machines that we call molecular jackhammers,” says Rice University chemist, James Tour. “They are more than one million times faster in the mechanical motion than the former motors, and they can be activated with near-infrared light rather than visible light.”

According to the study published in Nature Chemistry, the method was 99 percent effective against lab cultures of human melanoma cells, and half of the test mice with melanoma tumors became cancer-free after treatment. Near-infrared light penetrates far deeper into the body than visible light, accessing organs or bones without damaging tissue. Cancer in bones and organs could potentially be treated without needing surgery to reach the cancer growth.

Access all areas

Scientists at Northwestern University, Illinois, are breaking records—and the blood-brain barrier. Experimenting with a new sound wave technique, they’ve been able to treat a deadly brain cancer called glioblastoma in just four minutes. Publishing in The Lancet Oncology, the procedure has led to a four- to six-fold increase in drug concentrations in the human brain.

The blood-brain barrier is a network of blood vessels and tissue made up of closely spaced cells that helps keep harmful substances from reaching the brain—which typically includes the strongest cancer medicines too.

Northwestern’s research team demonstrate the results of a phase 1 in-human clinical trial with 17 patients. During surgery for resection or removal of their tumors, an ultrasound device was implanted into the skull. The device opens the blood-brain barrier, repeatedly using sound waves to permeate the barrier and reach the brain tumor. IV chemotherapy is then able to reach the neurological tissues where the cancer can grow. This novel technique helps treat a large region of the brain next to the cavity that remains after glioblastoma tumors are removed—and a phase 2 trial is underway. “While we have focused on brain cancer (for which there are approximately 30,000 gliomas in the U.S.), this opens the door to investigate novel drug-based treatments for millions of patients who suffer from various brain diseases,” co-author and Northwestern University neurosurgeon Adam Sonabend said in a statement.

In separate studies, targeted low-frequency sound waves have also temporarily opened the blood-brain barrier at the sites of tumors in stage 4 breast cancer patients and in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

Another wavelength

French physician Nostradamus famously prophesized that sound waves would destroy cancer cells, saying in the 16^th century: “After assessment gives the unique frequency to operate on the patients, waves of sound kill the cancers. They become lifeless. Their poisons leave the body.”

Sound waves are not new to science and medicine, but the technologies have always relied on low frequencies. Researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, have revealed how high frequency sound waves could transform the field of ultrasound-driven chemistry. High-frequency sound waves could be used to build new materials, make smart nanoparticles and deliver drugs to the lungs for painless, needle-free vaccinations, reports Science Daily.

“When we couple high-frequency sound waves into fluids, materials and cells, the effects are extraordinary," said lead researcher Professor Leslie Yeo in papers published in Advanced Science. "We've harnessed the power of these sound waves to develop innovative biomedical technologies and to synthesise advanced materials … but our discoveries have also changed our fundamental understanding of ultrasound-driven chemistry—and revealed how little we really know.”

While low-frequency cavitation can often destroy molecules and cells, they remain mostly intact under the high-frequency sound waves. This makes them gentle enough to use in biomedical devices to manipulate biomolecules and cells without affecting their integrity.

Pitch perfect

Instruments called “acoustic tweezers” could be used to deform cancer cells, says new data from the University of Southern California. Previous research has shown how cancer cells are soft and can spread through the body. The researchers have found a way to “stiffen them” and make it more difficult for them to migrate. “Acoustic tweezers have been developed and modelled after optical tweezers, which have been used to manipulate very small objects, down to molecular and atomic size,” writes Medical Xpress. “Acoustic tweezers work by sending sound waves through a medium, such as tissue. In shaping the sound waves, such devices can be used to manipulate objects in various ways.” Using ultrasound single-beam acoustic tweezers, the researchers were able to manipulate leukemia cells in a Petri dish–which opens up potential to develop new kinds of therapies, and study cancer tissue in novel new ways.

Tuning in

The Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute (KCI) in Detroit has introduced an innovative radio frequency device for its liver cancer patients—able to target and reduce cancerous tumors from home. The TheraBionic P1 device emits low levels of 27.12 MHz radio frequency electromagnetic fields that block the growth of tumor cells without affecting healthy tissue. “Twenty years ago, I hypothesized that radio frequencies might block tumor growth and hoped one day it could make a meaningful difference and become the future of cancer treatment,” said Boris Pasche, president and chief executive officer at KCI, and co-inventor of the device.

Approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the device will be an option for patients who fail first-and second-line therapies. Multiple clinical trials are underway studying the device’s impact on other cancers such as breast, brain, ovarian, gallbladder, pancreatic and prostate.

The bioelectric body

Biology 101 has taught us that the body has an electrical system that helps our hearts beat, our muscles twitch and respond, and our body communicate with our brain. When Fritz-Albert Popp first discovered that all living cells emit light as biophotons, he could not have anticipated the revolution this would create in biology and physics. Since then, there has been a great wave of research in the pioneering fields of biophotonic diagnosis, biophysics, biofields, and biomagnetism. Popp is one of possibly hundreds of brilliant scientists and researchers who inspired others to continue to fearlessly investigate the potential of electrical dynamics in the human body.

We live in a universe of beautiful vibrations . . . and one that is bioelectric. The manipulation and co-opting of the behavior of electrical pulses, sound and radio frequencies will expand the fields of “bioelectric medicine” and “electroceuticals,” and make our notion of drugs, pain, surgery and perhaps cancer, obsolete. Explore more on the beauty of our vibrational future in our book Tuning into Frequency (S&S/Simon Element 2020).

What else we are wandering…

🌌 Good vibes only
Scientists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have used vibrotactile comfort objects for social anxiety, while Harvard engineers created an ingestible capsule that vibrates within the stomach. These vibrations activate the same stretch receptors that sense when the stomach is distended, creating an illusory sense of fullness.

🔆 Want a glow up?
You’re already glowing. Ultra-sensitive cameras reveal our bodies emit tiny amounts of light imperceptible to the naked eye. It’s an ultra-weak biophoton emission that comes from activity of tiny particles called free radicals during the energy-making processes in our cells. The free radicals interact with fats and proteins, creating molecules that produce the glow when they react with substances like fluorophores.

Now it’s caught on camera. Photographer Hugo Baptista has created the Biophotonic Human project. Click here to see.

⚡️ Heated sound waves
High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is a minimally invasive treatment for localized prostate cancer—where sound waves are used at a temperature high enough to cause cell death. The technology uses high-frequency sound waves directed at the cancerous tissue through an ultrasound probe. At UC San Diego Health, HIFU provides an alternative to surgery or radiation for eligible patients.

🕊️ Sound of tranquility
Studies show that hearing could be the last sense to go when we die. What is the last sound you wish to hear at the end of your life? The sounds of medical devices often surround the most vulnerable times of our lives. That was the question Sen Sound posed for the OpenIDEO "End of Life Challenge." Sen Sound is a group of sound designers and researchers working with communities to explore how sound impacts our experience, emotion, and environment during the vulnerable times of our lives. Founded by ambient electronic musician Yoki Sen, they work with medical device companies to improve people’s experience in hospitals and other healthcare settings through participatory research and sound design. Collaborations include the innovation hub at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC (part of Johns Hopkins Medicine) to explore how sound affects people’s environment, experience and emotions, using human-centered design.

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