Medications to treat cancer not only kill cancer cells, but also affect our healthy. Often the reason a person gets sick from the treatment worse. The traditional chemotherapy in near future to come more personalized approach, when experts oncologists scrutinize the tumor rather than to begin to deal with it a wide range of different drugs.
The first invention belongs to the researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fundamentally new way to study the effect of various drugs on the patient's tumor. Typically, pharmaceutical companies are exploring drugs on extracted tissue samples from the body, so it is very difficult to predict exactly how cancer cells behave in the real world, and especially under the influence of a whole bunch of drugs.
Researchers at MIT have developed a tiny device the size of a grain of rice no more that needs to be implanted in the tumor tissue. The device can contain up to 16 doses of various microscopic preparations, which gradually affects the cancer cells. After a day of with a part extracted from the tumor tissue, and the scientists examined the effectiveness of the impact of certain drugs on the cancer cells.
The device already tested in various tumors of the laboratory mice, researchers have even tested his invention on particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. Subjects who have been through process, almost collided with the side effects, but doctors managed to find the optimal combination of drugs to effectively treat their illnesses. Complete clinical trial of a new method of selection of drugs should begin as early as next year.
The second method of selection of personalized products for the treatment of oncology have offered scientists from Cancer Research Center Fred Hutchinson in Seattle. They have developed a gadget CIVO, which is a syringe for injection into the tumor once the eight drugs. In this case it is important that the tumor is close to the human skin surface to needles could penetrate into its tissues.
After two or three days, as in the previous case, doctors removed part of the tumor tissues and studying the effects of drugs on cancer cells. Thus, two teams of researchers almost at the same time come to a novel method of selection of the right drug for the treatment of cancer. They are relatively forgiving regarding patient health as minimally affect the body through the tiny dosage. But for doctors it's a great way to risk-free to choose the most proper treatment plan.
What a way to eventually take root and be practicing oncologists, time will tell. But we can already say with certainty that the world is not standing still, and scientists are constantly working to improve the fight against deadly diseases of man.