2023-09-16 10:00:00
As small as a grain of rice, this implant could analyze the impact of drugs on tumors. Understanding drug effectiveness is vital to optimizing treatments.
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Boston have developed a implantas small as a grain of rice, which is able toassess the effects of medications on a patient’s brain tumor in real time during surgery. Currently, monitoring the effects of medications on brain cancer patients during surgery is limited to intraoperative MRI and tissue sampling after drug administration.
As small as a grain of rice, this implant could analyze the impact of drugs on tumors
This new technique, which currently goes by the name of microdialysis, is intended to be the least invasive option for testing the impact of drugs on brain tumors, but it still requires inserting an entire catheter into the cranial cavity.
During development, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital developed this device specifically to help test treatments in patients with brain cancer or glioma, a type of tumor found in the brain or spinal cord. The device only remains implanted in the patient for two or three hours, during which it delivers microdoses of the drug that we wish to analyze. It then becomes possible to observe the effect of around twenty drugs on the market for cancerous tumors, according to the researchers. Once the device is removed, sometimes before the operation is complete, the surrounding tissue is sent to the laboratory for analysis.
Understanding drug effectiveness is vital to optimizing treatments
In a recently published press release, Pierpaolo Peruzzi, one of the principal investigators on the project and assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Brigham and Women’s Hospitalsaid that knowing the impact of drugs on these tumors is vital: “We need to be able to understand, early enough, which drugs work best for each patient.”
Throughout the development process, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital conducted a clinical trial to observe the real impact of the implant on living patients. The study showed that none of the patients participating in this test experienced any adverse effects. The researchers were also able to retrieve biological data from these devices, such as what molecular changes occur when a particular drug is administered. While the study demonstrated that the implant can be easily incorporated surgically, researchers are still trying to determine how the data they collect could be used to optimize tumor therapies.
Researchers are currently conducting another study focused on implanting the device via a minimally invasive procedure 72 hours before the main surgery. Advances in cancer treatment continue, particularly with cocktails of drugs and other viruses that can fight cancer cells, continuing to arrive on the market. Implants like the one developed by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital bring scientists one step closer to being able to use tools and data to offer ever more personalized treatments to cancer patients.
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