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Electrical Field Treats Brain Cancer
amigoro writes "A device that specifically targets rapidly growing cancer cells with intermediate frequency electrical fields doubled the survival rates of patients with brain cancer, according to an article apperaring in PNAS. The device uses electrical fields to disrupt tumor growth by interfering with cell division of cancerous cells, causing them to stop proliferating and die off instead of dividing and growing. Healthy brain cells rarely divide and have different electrical properties than cancerous brain cells. This allows the device to target cancer cells without affecting the healthy cells. Essentially no device-related side effects were seenin the clinical trial."
They want their Rife machine back.
this is an interesting application- for a long time it has been known that cancer has drastically different biochemistry [clearly seen on some MRI scans] so it stands to reason they might also have odd electrical properties as well. since the treatment is confined to the immediate area near electrods placed on the skin of the scull any other effects would be limited to that area as well.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The basis of all chemotherapy and the like has constantly focused on the fundamental differences between cancerous cells and normal cells: ie the fact that they're not dividing rapidly.
This is why people who receive chemo have problems with diarrhea and hair loss.. it just so happens that those cells are rapidly dividing and are affected just as well.
However, other treatments (few and far between,) such for Chronic Mylogenous Leukemia using Gleevac, which is designed to target the BCR-ABL fusion protein or Herceptin, used against breast cancers that overexpress ErbB2 receptor, are both novel in the sense that they exploit even more unique features of the cancer. That's what makes them so fantastic.
This new therapy won't provide too many benefits as far as the nastyness of treatment b/c it works just like chemo (in the case of metastases.) However, in the case of solid tumors ie GBM schwannomas, etc. perhaps it could be useful.
By the way, 10 patients is nearly not enough to be conclusive in any respect.
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Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
The article states that the cells in the brain don't really replicate or regenerate.
t ml
However, recent research has shown that cells in the area of the hippocampus do in fact replicate, and are indicated in the role they play in cancer:
Take a peak:
http://www.biopsychiatry.com/newbraincell/index.h
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Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
I'm not putting high-voltage machinery next to my BRAIN. That'll cause...oh wait.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
The physics geniuses on Slashdot, not to mention the cell phone industry, keep saying that electromagnetic radiation is non-ionizing, so it can't affect the brain!
1) I have been battling cancer for three years; I'm pretty familiar with the methods and mechanisms of treatment.
2) I've read that it's a myth that cancer cells divide more quickly than healthy cells. The defect is that they continue dividing when they should sense that it's time to stop dividing. It's a matter of duration rather than rate.
3) There are many different kinds of chemotherapy. Some make hair fall out, some cause diarrhea, some cause nausea, some damage skin, some make nerves go whacky. I've had all of those side effects from one drug or another. There are BIG differences between chemotherapies which must mean there are differences in their effect on cells.
4) Brain cancers are particulary troublesome because many drugs can't crossing the blood-brain barrier. Electromagnetism could be very useful where chemotherapy is ineffective.
5) Immunotherapy can be useful at slowing tumor growth or making cancer cells more susceptible to chemotherapy. But immunotherapy alone often isn't enough, and immunotherapy can have very nasty side effects. I suffered much pain and scarring from Erbitux, a drug that blocks epithelial growth factor, but it didn't do a lick of good for my colon cancer.
6) A trial on ten patients won't be the basis for widespread application of this method. But positive results in a human trial is far ahead of many of the supposed breakthroughs that we read about on Slashdot.
AlpineR
I should precurse this by saying that I am a medical physicist, irradiating cancer cells is what I do for a living.
Unlike the hype and scaremongering about cell phones, this actually has some science behind it. An article in Cancer Research (2004) (: Cancer Res. 2004 May 1;64(9):3288-95.) desribes the same technique (by the same authors) applied in vitro. This means they took some cancer cells in a test tube and subjected them to the fields. There they saw that over the course of 24 hours there is an inhibition in growth, over several days in tumors implanted in mice a reduction in tumor growth was seen (this means that the tumor grows slower).
Independently, a group in Cleveland investigated the influence of electric fields at very low frequencies (50Hz, yes that's the frequency of our daily AC-current) and found inhibition of cell cycles, (this means that the cell is moving through it's cycle).
To put things into context, we see some inhibition at low frequency (50Hz), and disruption of cell division at 100-300kHz. Cell phones work at frequencies of the horder of GHz. (for you slashdotters, replacing Hz with bytes will tell you all you need to now about the relative values of kHz, MHz and GHz ;-) )
So I am reasonably optimistic that there is some truth to all this. However, there seems to be a selectivity that will not work as an advantage all of the time. The technique only seems to work if the field is switched on during cell mitosis. This means it will only work on cells that are actively replicating. So the it will only work well if and when the cells you are targeting have a different proliferation rate, than the ones you do not want to affect. Of course brain cells are a good example as their replication rate is extremely slow (if any).
Some caveats: The experiment (in vitro) as described, has not been reproduced by an independent group. The number of patients used in the in vivo experiment is very low, too low to distinguish with any significant probability that the results obtained are not merely a statistical effect. The results however are promising. But that is the way science works. Slowly and methodically: FYI there is a specific way things are done when new modalities are found: 1) You look for dose effects, what is the dose that does no harm. This means you take a group of people and give each subsection and ever increasing dose until you see some bad effects. 2) Then perform a study of efficacy giving a large group of people the determined dose and see if there still is an effect, 3) Finally you compare this with a standard of care (the thing you normally do) with your new stuff in a double blind study (which means you, nor the patient knows beforehand what the treatment is going to be and see if you see a different cure rate.
You might say, if it is so good we want it now. I can say the process described above goes faster the bigger the difference is with the standard of care.