Technique Developed to Help Clinicians Treat Early Brain Glioma Tumors

A new technique for detecting and treating deadly brain tumors earlier using a nanotechnology Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) contrast agent has been developed.

The agent can pass through the blood-brain barrier and provides opportunities to treat normally fatal gliomas. Patients with cancerous gliomas have a median survival rate of 14 months after they are diagnosed.

The new approach was developed by researchers at the Department of Neurosurgery of Penn State College of Medicine (Hershey, PA, USA), and was published in the Journal of Neuro-Oncology.

Current treatment options for patients with malignant glioma are surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy but the cancer often returns, surviving initial treatments, and follow-up MRI scans often are unable to catch the tumors in time. Existing MRI contrast agents can only find tumors after they are large enough to damage the blood-brain barrier. The Penn State research team found a way to created "smart fat cells" or liposomes that are able to pass the blood-brain barrier in mice, and find cancerous gliomas earlier. The liposomes work together with Magnevist, a common MRI contrast agent, and are also studded with proteins that target receptors on glioma cells. According to the researchers, smart fat cells may be used in the future to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs, and contrast agents, to brain tumor patients, to detect and remove cancer cells.

James Connor, distinguished professor of neurosurgery, said "Patients typically don't die from the tumor they initially presented with. Rather, they die from new tumors that come back in other parts of the brain. The goal is to be able to get down to detecting single cancer cells. Ultrasound, with all of its good qualities, is disruptive to the blood-brain barrier, whereas we can get an agent to cross it without causing disruption."

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