AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ Used to Increase Effectiveness of Cancer Drug Delivery

Okay, this might be the strangest headline you read all week and it's only Monday, but it's true! Yes, AC/DC's all-time classic "Thunderstruck" was used for the benefit of medical science, ultimately increasing the effectiveness in the delivery of a cancer drug.

The drug needed to be coated in a polymer and the AC/DC classic was played through a speaker where the vibrations from the song sent the drugs tumbling in the air where they then received the coating. The Lead South Australia spoke to senior research author Professor Nico Voelcker, who stated, “The micro particles are porous, basically they are like a sponge. You fill them up with a drug, but of course you want to prevent the drug from escaping, and that is why we create the coating."

Going on to explain an issue that plagues this process, Voelcker added, “Normally we would ignite a plasma onto the surface. The problem with doing that is you only form the coating on one side of the particle, the side that is exposed. But the side of the particle on the surface, the other side, is not going to get coated. That is where we came up with the idea of using a loud speaker that we would play into the system. We would turn that loudspeaker to a song that it would vibrate and the particles would bounce up and down. The chaotic frequencies worked well and gave you a more homogenous coating.”

"The overcoating resulted in a markedly slower release of the cytotoxic drug, and this effect correlated positively with the plasma polymer coating times, ranging from two-fold up to more than 100-fold," states the paper, “Thunderstruck”: Plasma-Polymer-Coated Porous Silicon Microparticles As a Controlled Drug Delivery System. 

In July of last year, it was revealed that AC/DC guitarist Malcolm Young had battled lung cancer and was equipped with a pacemaker. The news came after the announcement that the six-stringer was forced to step down from the band after suffering from dementia that was the result of a stroke.

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