One potential application for the new technology is cancer therapy, which has historically represented "a delicate tradeoff between killing the disease and killing the patient," said Tatyana Gurvich, a geriatric clinical pharmacologist at the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy and the University of California, Irvine Medical Center who wasn't involved in the research.
Chemotherapeutic agents specifically target fast-growing cells, such as those found in tumors, she said. But when they're allowed to flood the entire body, other fast-growing tissues, including the gut lining and the red and white cells of the blood, are also at risk.
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