New tool predicts tumor reaction to chemotherapy
For many cancer patients, chemotherapy can be very frustrating — sometimes more than the disease itself. Patient’s body can respond fine to one drug, refuse another; tumors can mutate, thus turning the time spent on healing into a complete waste. However, researchers from UCLA are set to change all this.
Scientists from the University of California in Los Angeles have created a non-invasive approach that may one day allow physicians to evaluate a tumor’s response to a drug before prescribing therapy, enabling them to quickly pinpoint the most effective treatment and personalize it to a patient’s unique biochemistry.
“For the first time, we can watch a chemotherapy drug working inside the living body in real time,” said Dr. Caius Radu, one of the researchers. “We plan to test this method in healthy volunteers within the year to determine whether we can replicate our current results in humans.”
The experiment started by injected a probe into mice that had developed leukemia and lymphoma tumors. After an hour, the researchers imaged the animals’ bodies using positron emission tomography (PET), a non-invasive scan often used on cancer patients to identify whether a tumor has spread from its original site or returned after remission.
“The PET scanner operates like a molecular camera, enabling us to watch biological processes in living animals and people,” said Radu. “Because we tag the probe with positron-emitting particles, the cells that absorb it glow brighter under the PET scan.”
The scientists plan to expand their research on a wider spectrum of drugs. Radu said that the beauty of this approach is that it is completely non-invasive and without side effects.
The details are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: ucla.edu
