New technique ‘can determine if a cancer therapy is effective’

Cancer patients could one day be able to know whether their chemo-therapy has worked in"real time". Scientists are honing in on a technique which can assess the effectiveness of the cancer treatment in as little as eight hours after administration. Conventional methods of testing the effectiveness of treatment, such as scans, usually cannot detect whether a tumour is shrinking until a patient has received multiple cycles of therapy. But experts from the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, in the US, have developed an approach which can alert them to the death of cancer cells the moment the drugs begin to work. Using a nanoparticle that delivers cancer therapy and then glows green when cancer cells die, researchers were able to see whether a tumour is resistant or susceptible to chemotherapy or immunotherapy. The finding, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could one day mean that patients are not given more chemotherapy that does not respond to their cancer. "Using this approach, the cells light up the moment a cancer drug starts working. We can determine if a cancer therapy is effective within hours of treatment," said...

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