Question: how does the tracking of nanoparticles into human cells create a solution to make drugs to help cure cancer?

Philippa Bird answered on 25 Jun 2012:

Ok, so basically you put the drugs into the nanoparticles and send them into the body. The reason you’d want to do this is because when you have chemotherapy (which is what the drugs are), you are basically poisoning the whole body, which is why you get sick and your hair falls out etc. So you have to have a high enough dose to cure the cancer while keeping it low enough to not kill the person. If you put the drug inside the nanoparticle there are ways of sending it just to the cancer and not the rest of the body. Not only do you want to only send it to the cancer cells, you also want to send it to the right place in the cell. You can do both of these things by putting the right coating on the nanoparticles. So that is where the laser tracking comes in – we can see if our coating did what we wanted it to, by watching the nanoparticle go into the cell and to the right place in the cell, and therefore make sure the nanoparticle is as good as possible before we give the nanoparticle-drug to animals or humans!
You need a laser and not just a microscope because the nanoparticle is 1000 times small than a cell, and they are already hard to see with a normal microscope!