From today's video
For a hundred years we fought cancer with chemistry. Now scientists are using physics. Every study is below.
Chemistry
A molecule fits a lock. Chemotherapy, targeted drugs and antibodies all work by shape: find the right lock, block it.
Physics
Light, vibration and electrons do the work. The target is the physical machinery of the cell, so there is no single lock for a tumor to change.
Rice University, Texas A&M and UT Austin
“In Texas, a beam of light makes molecules stuck to cancer cells vibrate trillions of times a second, shaking the cells apart.”
The team used aminocyanine, a dye already used in medical imaging, which tucks itself into the outer membrane of a cell. Hit it with near-infrared light and the electrons across the whole molecule start oscillating together. Physicists call that collective motion a plasmon, and it is a quantum effect.
The molecule shakes on the order of 40 trillion times a second and tears the membrane open. It kills by force. In their tests it was not heat, and blocking the reactive oxygen that light-based cancer treatments usually rely on did not stop it. The researchers call the molecules molecular jackhammers.
Why it matters: cancer cells learn to pump drugs out or repair the damage. It is much harder to evolve a defense against being physically torn open. The same lab has since made new versions of the molecule and reported activity against colorectal, prostate and breast cancer cells in the lab.
University of Nottingham, England
“In England, a wireless signal makes electrons quantum tunnel through barriers inside brain tumor cells, and the tumor cells self-destruct while the healthy ones next to them don't.”
Frankie Rawson's team coated gold nanoparticles with cytochrome c, a protein your cells already use to pass electrons along, and called them bio-nanoantennae. Inside glioblastoma cells, the most aggressive brain cancer in adults, a weak wireless electric field drives electrons to jump between molecules.
That jump is quantum tunneling: a particle crossing a barrier it does not have the energy to climb over, which is impossible for anything the size of a person and routine for an electron. Here it switched on apoptosis, the cell's own self-destruct program. Healthy brain support cells (astrocytes) under the same conditions were not affected.
Illustration, not a micrograph.
Two major reviews published in May 2026 pulled this work together under one heading: quantum nanomedicine. Here is what each one maps.
Advanced Science, May 6, 2026. Shanghai University
Clinical and Translational Medicine, May 18, 2026. Seoul National University Bundang Hospital and Yonsei
Also this year: a Columbia team (Nature Genetics, August 2026) showed cancer cells settle into a small number of fixed states, the way electrons sit on fixed energy levels, and that drug combinations can hit every state at once. "Quantum" there is an analogy, not physics, but it is the same shift in thinking. Columbia's summary.
X-rays came out of a physics lab in 1895 and were in hospitals within a year. MRI started as a physics discovery in the 1940s. This is what the next one looks like at the very beginning.
You do not have to wait for quantum medicine to meet quantum biology. Inside every mitochondrion, electrons travel down a chain of proteins to make your energy, and they cross the gaps between those proteins by tunneling. It is the same effect the Nottingham team harnessed, and it has been measured for decades.
That machinery has two everyday requirements:
Those two are the backbone of MGB+, the gut-brain formula line I built for people with IBS-like symptoms who were told their tests look fine.
To be clear: MGB+ is a dietary supplement for gut-brain symptoms. It does not treat, prevent or cure cancer, and nothing on this page suggests it does.
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Emergency physician and editor-in-chief of Emergency Medicine News. Former chief physician for Delaware's Division of Public Health. Before medicine, I studied aerospace engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy and served as a nuclear submariner. I founded BellyMD to bring gut-brain science out of the journals and into people's hands.
Educational content, not medical advice. The cancer research on this page is early and has not been tested in people. MGB+ is a dietary supplement; these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and MGB+ is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Images are illustrations. Spotted an error? Tell me.