There may not seem to be a connection between physics and getting rid of cancer cells, but Dr. Ahmed El-Gendy, an Egyptian physicist at the University of Texas at El Paso, succeeded in creating that connection and presented a physical method that eliminates cancer cells, for which he recently earned the Marie Curie Award for 2026 in the field of nanomedicine for cancer treatment from the International Society for Advanced Materials in Sweden.
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The prize is named after Marie Curie, the pioneering scientist who won two Nobel Prizes and dedicated her life to harnessing science for the benefit of humanity, and is one of the highest awards in the field of advanced materials. This award recognizes more than 20 years of continuous research
This honor comes two years after he received another award from the same society, making him one of the few researchers to have received consecutive honors from it.
Ahmed expressed his happiness at the recent honor, which relates to an achievement that may radically change the methods of treating solid tumors in the future.
This achievement, detailed in Acta Biomaterialia, one of the world's leading journals in biomedical materials research, concerns the shift from heat as a means of killing cancer cells to force as an alternative tool, yielding better results without negatively impacting healthy cells. This particular research is the culmination of over 20 years of scientific work in this field.
Dr. Ahmed explains the new method, saying that "the motivation for thinking about it is to get rid of the drawbacks of the traditional method that relies on (magnetic hyperthermia), which is based on introducing magnetic nanoparticles into the tumor, so that the tumor is exposed to an alternating magnetic field, and the particles respond to the magnetic field and convert part of the energy into heat, and this leads to the temperature of the tumor usually rising to about 40–45 degrees Celsius, and the high temperature in turn damages the cancer cells and helps to kill them."
He continues: "But the problem is that reaching this temperature requires a large quantity of nanoparticles, and the heating may affect the surrounding healthy tissue, which is the problem that the new method addresses."
The new experimental method relies on the use of very fine nanoparticles made of iron and carbon, which are so small that they fit inside the cancer cell. A low-frequency magnetic field is then applied to stimulate these particles to rotate and vibrate.
Dr. Ahmed says, "This physical movement leads to tearing the cancer cell from the inside. We move from heat to force, and this eliminates the side effects that heat might have on the neighboring healthy cells."
In experiments on mice, the particles were used at two relatively low concentrations, and then the tumors were exposed to a magnetic field. With repeated treatment, the size of prostate and breast cancer tumors decreased, with the reduction being more pronounced when the higher concentration of particles was used.
What is the next step?
Dr. Ahmed explains that the next step after proving the particles' ability to shrink tumors in mice without obvious mass heating will be to try to decipher the mechanism by which this effect occurs, determine the optimal dose and exposure regime, and then test safety on larger animal models before considering moving to human trials.
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