Taipei (dpa) - Taiwan's Chang Gung Memorial Hospital Tuesday
announced a new option that may help treat brain cancer, whose
fatality and recurrence are said to be among the highest of all
cancers.
"We are using a procedure that combines the use of magnets,
ultrasound and chemotherapy drug-coated nano-particles to overcome
the difficulty of having the drug cross the blood-brain barrier,"
said Wei Kuo-chen, chief neurosurgeon at the hospital.
Wei said the typical way of treating brain cancer includes
craniotomy - cutting open the brain to remove the tumour - but since
a brain tumour cannot be completely removed, the surgeon must then
administer radiation and anti-cancer drugs to the tumour region after
the operation.
"However, it is always difficult to deliver adequate doses of the
drugs to the tumour region because the brain is insulated by a
tightly knit layer of cells called the blood-brain barrier that
prevents toxic materials from reaching the brain," he said.
As a result the tumour often recurs because the concentrations of
the drugs are often too low, he noted.
Wei, who led a team of researchers in developing the new approach,
said they injected tiny magnetic beads called nano-particles coated
with chemotherapy drugs into rats' tails. "We then used ultrasound
beams to open up a small region of the blood-brain barrier and a
magnetic field to guide the particles to the exact location of the
tumour region," he said.
He said rats with brain tumours treated with such a combination
procedure were able to survive 66 per cent longer than untreated rats.
The new method was published in Tuesday's edition of the journal
Proceedings of National Academy of Science.
Wei said his team is working to improve the treatment, but it
would take at least four to five years for clinical trials on humans.
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