Ultrasound Technique Provides a New Radiation Free Way To Visualize Tumors

FirephoxRising writes "Traditionally ultrasound has seen limited use in cancer treatment due to clarity and resolution issues. But researchers at the UNC School of Medicine have overcome this limitation by combining ultrasound with a contrast agent composed of tiny bubbles that pair with an antibody that many cancer cells produce at higher levels than do normal cells. 'The SFRP2-moleculary targeted contrast agent showed specific visualization of the tumor vasculature,' said Klauber-DeMore. 'In contrast, there was no visualization of normal blood vessels. This suggests that the contrast agent may help distinguish malignant from benign masses found on imaging.'"

Comments

Only one side effect

[fatphil]

Unfortunately the ultrasonics cause a Karman vortex street, which has been known to induce panic, particularly in snow hikers.

Re:Only one side effect

[stoploss]

Unfortunately the ultrasonics cause a Karman vortex street, which has been known to induce panic, particularly in snow hikers.

No, no, NO!

Infrasound causes Karman vortices, ultrasound causes spontaneous combustion and pregnancy. Please stop spreading misinformation.

Tiny Bubbles

[umdesch4]

So, if this contrast agent attaches to cancer cells more than normal ones, could it be used to deliver targeted death to the cancer cells?

Re:Tiny Bubbles

[MakerDusk]

What you're looking for is something called Tumor Specific Proteins. At that point, it's very easy to coat a gold nano particle have it attach to cancerous cells, and then heat them up via surface plasmon resonance (they're tuned to the type of electromagnetic radiation that will reach the tumor: be it laser, xray, or gamma ray. At that point, resonance causes the GNP to heat up the heat induces cell death in the cancerous cells to which they have bonded. The blocker on this line of treatment is government regulation and the wonderful independent studies performed by those who produce chemotherapy drugs.

Re:'Radiation Free'

[quantumghost]

With tumors surely more traditional X-rays could only help matters (radiotherapy-lite)

Lol....nice try. External beam radiation therapy (XRT) ....varies depending on the type and stage of cancer being treated. For curative cases, the typical dose for a solid epithelial tumor ranges from 60 to 80 Gy, while lymphomas are treated with 20 to 40 Gy. Whereas a CT scan (the cardiac one being the highest dosing) tops out at 40-100 mGy or 2-3 orders of magnitude less.

In reference to the article, it is an interesting concept. Will need some work to improve its general applicability. By this the SFRP2 is only specific for colorectal and myelomas, so the technique is very limited. Also, please note that ultrasound is horrible to use around bowel, especially colon...the gas in the colon very effectively blocks the sound waves and you get very poor/incomplete images. Besides, colonoscopy is the gold standard for screening and has the advantage of being therapeutic or allowing tissue biopsies which can seal the diagnosis. Granted most need at least some sedation, but at 10 year intervals for most, this is a pretty acceptable tradeoff.

The only other question I have is the applicability....again, even if they can increase the scope of the detection, a full scan of the body for mets would be very unsatisfactory using ultrasound....now if we start talking about sarcomas, renal cell, breast cancer, yeah, I could see this working out. Lung, brain, ENT cancers, not so much.

Not news. At all, really.

[Idarubicin]

The idea of using microbubbles to enhance ultrasound contrast is at least thirty years old.

Microbubbles have been used both experimentally and commercially as a contrast-enhancing agent in ultrasound imaging for at least twenty years.

Coupling affinity probes (like antibodies) to microbubbles in order to increase their specificity has been done for more than a decade. Extensive work has been done in tissue and animal models. (The study in the Slashdot story is just another mouse study.)

Unlike the study promoted here, there are a number of published reports - as well as clinical trials - involving use of these probe-coupled microbubbles in real human beings to study real people with real diseases. (See for example this 2012 review.) It's nice that UNC is studying this stuff and it's good to see the number of targets for this technique being increased...but breathless press releases aside, this particular study isn't really cutting-edge.