Breast cancer has been the major cause of death of women within the ages of 40-60 years. It's mortality rate has gone so high in the recent years.
With advance in medicine, the use of mammograms was encouraged to check for the presence of cancer in the women at early stages. This has helped so much in detecting cancers at early stages and has reduced the mortality rate though not to a reasonable extent.
Here is the problem, As many as one in three women treated for breast cancer undergo unnecessary procedures, but a new method for diagnosing it could do a better job distinguishing between benign and aggressive tumors.
Researchers at the University of Michigan are developing a pill that makes tumors shine when exposed to infrared light and this has been shown in mice.
According to a research in Denmark last year, it was observed that most tumors that undergone surgery or chemotherapy are not malignant. In some women, lumps of tissue hide the presence of tumors and this causes death. All these point to the fact that information gotten from a mammogram is not enough in treatment of tumors.
The move could also catch cancers that would have gone undetected. Thurber, the research head and his team uses a dye that responds to infrared light to tag a molecule commonly found on tumor cells, in the blood vessels that feed tumors and in inflamed tissue. By providing specific information on the types of molecules on the surface of the tumor cells, physicians can better distinguish a malignant cancer from a benign tumor.
Compared to visible light, infrared light penetrates the body easily -- it can get to all depths of the breast without an X-ray's tiny risk of disrupting DNA and seeding a new tumor. Using a dye delivered orally rather than directly into a vein also improves the safety of screening, as a few patients in 10,000 can have severe reactions to intravenous dyes. These small risks turn out to be significant when tens of millions of women are screened every year in the U.S. alone.
But it's not easy to design a pill that can carry the dye to the tumor.
"To get a molecule absorbed into the bloodstream, it needs to be small and greasy. But an imaging agent needs to be larger and water-soluble. So you need exact opposite properties," Thurber said.
Fortunately, they weren't the only people looking for a molecule that could get from the digestive system to a tumor. The pharmaceutical company Merck was working on a new treatment for cancer and related diseases. They got as far as phase II clinical trials demonstrating its safety, but unfortunately, it wasn't effective.
"It's actually based on a failed drug," Thurber said. "It binds to the target, but it doesn't do anything, which makes it perfect for imaging."
The targeting molecule has already been shown to make it through the stomach unscathed, and the liver also gives it a pass, so it can travel through the bloodstream. The team attached a molecule that fluoresces when it is struck with infrared light to this drug. Then, they gave the drug to mice that had breast cancer, and they saw the tumors light up.
Source: University of Michigan. "Pill for breast cancer diagnosis may outperform mammograms." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 30 April 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180430131433.htm>