Technology from NASA has benefited various commercial healthcare applications on earth, ranging from reducing chemotherapy's side effects to improving diagnostic imaging. In the latest achievement to join the list, it may also enhance an up-and-coming area of cancer treatment called irreversible electroporation. Back in late 2009, researchers at NASA's Langley Research Center, the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and the National Institute of Aerospace created a practical technique to synthesize high-quality boron-nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) for the medical, aerospace, and energy industries. A new study now indicates that these BNNTs could double the effectiveness of irreversible electroporation, a new minimally invasive technique used to treat soft tissue tumors in the liver, lung, prostate, head and neck, kidney, and pancreas.

A new study  by researchers in Italy's Institute of Life Sciences, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa indicates that adding boron-nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) to the surface of cancer cells can double the effectiveness of this technique.

"Irreversible Electroporation is a way of putting holes in the wall of a tumor cell," said Michael W. Smith, chief scientist at BNNT, LLC and formerly a staff scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. The BNNTs used in the study are highly crystalline and have a small diameter. Structurally, they also contain few walls with minimal defects, and are very long and highly flexible.

In tests conducted in a petri dish, they found that the Irreversible Electroporation treatment method killed twice as many cancer cells with BNNTs (88 percent) on the cell surface than without (40 percent). The researchers are now attempting to scale up the production process, while also improving the purity of the BNNTs.