?Bed-of-nails? breast implant deters cancer cells

One in eight women in the United States will develop breast cancer. Of those, many will undergo surgery to remove the tumour and will require some kind of breast reconstruction afterward, often involving implants. Cancer is an elusive target, though, and malignant cells return for as many as one-fifth of women originally diagnosed, according to the American Cancer Society.
Would it be possible to engineer implant materials that might drive down that rate of relapse? Brown University biomedical scientists report some promising advances. The team has created an implant with a ‘bed-of-nails’ surface at the nanoscale (dimensions one-billionth of a meter, or 1/50,000th the width of a human hair) that deters cancer cells from dwelling and thriving. Made out of a common federally approved polymer, the implant is the first of its kind, based on a review of the literature, with modifications at the nanoscale that cause a reduction in the blood-vessel architecture on which breast cancer tumours depend