One very good example is the work with nanoshells being done at Rice by Dr. Naomi Halas and Dr. Jennifer West.
The process:
during your regular checkup, your doctor injects you with nanoshells, then shines a "near-infrared" light over your body, briefly. Then a program on their laptop indicates location, shape and size of any new early-stage tumors. Once located, each tumor can then be hit with the same light, at higher energies, killing the tumor, and not damaging the surrounding tissues.
within the next decade cancer will become more of just a bit of a nuisance than something life threatening
Shame things like these are going to come too late for millions of people, but trials are starting next year, take a read of this
While drug companies cast about for a better pill to treat cancer, Naomi Halas has turned to nanotechnology. The Rice University engineer is the inventor of the “nanoshell,” a gold-coated globe of silica about 1/20 the size of a red blood cell that attaches itself to tumors.
Halas has shown, in petri dishes, that flashes of near-infrared light burn the shells and cancerous tissue without destroying healthy cells. Now, just under a year later, Halas says the nanoshells work just as effectively in rodents. Tumorous mice injected with nanoshells and then exposed to infrared light became cancer-free within 10 days, and stayed that way after treatment. Good news for rodents, but will it work in humans? We’ll find out next year when Halas begins clinical trials.