PITTSBURGH, Pa (Ivanhoe Newswire)— As many as half to two-thirds of all cancer patients are prescribed radiation therapy, treatment that is targeted to kill any cancer cells left behind after surgery. Now, researchers are trying to identify ways for personalized radiation, improving a patient’s quality of life. Ivanhoe has more.
For some patients, cancer surgery is followed by intensive radiation treatments designed to keep cancer cells from coming back. But …
“One of the problems with radiation is it has side effects. It has toxicities and those toxicities last lifelong,” explained Heath Skinner, MD, PhD, UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.
Dr. Skinner and his colleagues are researching ways to improve a patient’s response to radiation and ultimately decrease exposure to radiation. For starters, they’ve identified two proteins in solid tumors called hat that might make cancer resistant to treatment. The researchers are also testing drugs that are currently in development to block those proteins.
“If you combine that with radiation in the mutated tumors, you have these dramatic responses, some of the best responses I’ve ever seen in animal models,” said Dr. Skinner.
The researchers have also examined the mutations and radiation resistance in human cells, bringing them one step closer to personalized radiation.
“If we can combine an agent, a targeted agent with radiation to make radiation work so much better on the cancer cells, maybe we can pull back the radiation dose, make it less toxic while still having really good effectiveness and making cancer go away and not come back,” continued Dr. Skinner.
The researchers focused on head and neck tumors but say the approach could work with other solid tumors, like those in the lung. Dr. Skinner says he anticipates human clinical trials to identify the mutations in a year or so.
Contributors to this news report include: Cyndy McGrath Producer; Kirk Manson, Videographer; Roque Correa, Editor.
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MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS
RESEARCH SUMMARY
TOPIC: PERSONALIZED RADIATION BOOSTS CANCER SURVIVAL: MEDICINE’S NEXT BIG THING?
REPORT: MB #5002
RADIATION BACKGROUND: Radiation is used to fight cancer cells because the treatment involves high doses of radiation to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors. At a low dose, radiation is also used in x-rays to see inside your body as with teeth or broken bones. As it pertains to treating cancer, radiation therapy kills cancer cells which then slows their growth by damaging the cell’s DNA. When the cancer cell is damaged beyond repair, they stop dividing and die. When they are dead, they are broken down and removed from the body. Radiation does not kill cancer cells immediately. It can take days or weeks of treatment before the DNA of the cancer cells are damaged enough to remove them. Even after, the cancer cells left keep dying for weeks or even months after the radiation therapy ends.
(Source: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/radiation-therapy)
RADIATION THERAPIES: There are two main types of radiation therapy, external beam and internal beam. The type of radiation therapy a patient receives is dependent upon the type of cancer, the size of the tumor, the tumor’s location in the body, how close the tumor is to normal tissues that are sensitive to radiation, your general health and medical history, whether you will have other types of cancer treatment and other factors, such as your age and other medical conditions. External beam radiation therapy comes from a machine that aims radiation at the cancer cells. The machine does not physically touch you but can move around you sending the radiation to the part of the body that holds the cancer cells. This is a local treatment which means it only treats a specific part of your body. Internal radiation therapy is different in that a source of radiation is put inside your body, or near the tumor. It is also a local treatment, and only treats a specific part of the body.
(Source: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/radiation-therapy)
NEW TECHNOLOGY: Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy is a new approach that is being applied to some types of cancer. This treatment is different from traditional approaches because it uses highly focused radiation concentrated on small tumors and only low doses to surrounding tissues. This is done in an effort to use fewer treatments and make them more biologically effective. Since the treatment has to be so detailed and direct, a four-dimensional CT scan is required before the treatment to map out the exact positioning of the cancer cells or tumor.
(Source: https://www.uclahealth.org/radonc/treatment-advances-sbrt)
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS REPORT, PLEASE CONTACT:
Cynthia Patton
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