A recent breakthrough in tumor-imaging technology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine and its affiliated Karmanos Cancer Institute promises to greatly reduce the wait time for assessing the effects of chemotherapy on many different kinds of cancer.
Anthony Shields, MD, Ph.D., WSU professor of internal medicine, believes the newly refined technology, which uses chemically engineered "radio tracers" to track rates of growth in tumors, will soon allow clinicians to speed up their evaluation of drug therapy on cancer cells, giving them a better chance of slowing down or even completely neutralizing the disease in patients. The faster imaging system will also protect patients from the toxic effects of anti-cancer drugs by reducing the amount of time needed to evaluate various cancer-fighting agents.
Dr. Shields and his research team, who are funded by $2 million in federal grants, created the new diagnostic tool by injecting a compound in which radioactive tracers are chemically bound to a key cell nutrient. After the nutrients migrate to the tumor cells, Dr. Shields uses a positron emission tomography scanner to measure growth activity in the cancer by tracking the amount of radioactive material consumed along with the nutrient during tumor cell division and growth.
Dr. Shields, who has spent nearly two decades developing and refining innovative tumor-imaging systems, said he is quite hopeful that this method will provide faster and more powerful drug therapy for cancer patients.
"We're very excited about the therapeutic possibilities of this new technology," he said. "Achieving the much shorter waiting time is significant because with the older imaging methods, we usually needed two months or more to make the same assessment.
"Getting a faster evaluation of tumor growth will be extremely helpful to patients, since we now have 300 to 400 new cancer drugs that are about to come online as treatment therapies. Which ones will be best to help a particular patient? One of the toughest challenges we face as clinicians is finding a way to quickly determine whether a particular drug is working or not."