Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Monitoring Cell Death Could Help Cancer Treatment

Image: Death of a tumor: This PET scan, taken just days after radiation therapy, shows a hot spot of cell-death activity in a brain tumor--a good indication that the therapy is working. Credit: Aaron Allen, Davidoff Comprehensive Cancer Center, Rabin Medical Center

From Technology Review:

An earlier measure of treatment could improve patients' prognosis.

When it comes to aggressive cancers, in the brain or lung for example, oncologists know that the sooner they can determine whether a treatment is unsuccessful, the sooner they can reevaluate and, if necessary, prescribe a new course of action. But typically, it takes two months or more to do the before-and-after comparisons that help determine whether a tumor is shrinking. Now an Israeli company called Aposense says it may have found a way to drastically speed up the process: an imaging marker that, when used with PET scans, indicates the presence of dying cells.

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