Putting The Lab In The Patient - New Device Helps Tailor Personalized Cancer Treatment
Friday, April 24, 2015 - 07:00
in Health & Medicine
More than 100 drugs have been approved to treat cancer but predicting which ones will help a particular patient hasn't really been possible. A new device may change that. It is an implantable device, about the size of the grain of rice, and can carry small doses of up to 30 different drugs. After implanting it in a tumor and letting the drugs diffuse into the tissue, researchers can measure how effectively each one kills the patient's cancer cells. Such a device could eliminate much of the guesswork now involved in choosing cancer treatments, says Oliver Jonas, a postdoc at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and lead author of the paper in Science Translational Medicine. read more