Nanotechnology Driving Big Advances in Cancer Imaging
Date: 10.5.2006
Throughout the history of modern medicine, and particularly clinical oncology, important advances in treating illness and injury have usually followed the development of new ways to better see within the body. The advent of computed tomography (CT) imaging, for example, provided images of developing tumors in far greater detail than was possible with conventional x-rays, giving oncologists a means of both better localizing tumors before surgically removing them and the first real glimpse of whether a given therapy was causing a tumor to shrink.
Similarly, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provided greater anatomical detail still, while the development of positron emission tomography (PET) gave both cancer researchers and oncologists the ability to monitor a tumor’s metabolic activity, and as a result, an even quicker way of assessing the effectiveness of therapy.
Though undoubtedly a boon for cancer researchers and clinical oncologists, each of these revolutionary imaging technologies could benefit patients even more.
Each of these imaging methods suffers from a common shortcoming — they just aren’t sensitive enough to accurately find the smallest tumors that are most easily and effectively treated. Also, most imaging methods produce static images, snapshots of a tumor at one particular time that do not reveal much about dynamic events, such as the binding of a drug to a particular tissue. But increasingly, it appears that nanotechnology may be able to provide that leap in sensitivity that would not only impact today’s approach to therapy but could lead to entirely new pathways for both detecting and treating cancer.
“The promise of nanotechnology for cancer imaging is such that we have little doubt that it will lead to far more sensitive and accurate detection of early stage cancer,” says Adrian Lee, Ph.D., an associate professor of medicine who specializes in translational breast cancer research at Baylor College of Medicine. “But I also believe that we are just at the beginning of the process of applying nanotechnology to the problems of imaging cancer. I have confidence that as the oncology and physical sciences communities continue to find common scientific ground that there are going to be some surprising advances that will come of this work. These efforts will blur the boundaries of what we call detection and what we call therapy.”
For example, Lee and his colleagues at Baylor, including chemistry professor Lon Wilson, Ph.D., have begun working on a project funded by the National Cancer Institute to determine how best to use novel nanoscale MRI contrast agents made of iron or gadolinium, two types of atoms that “resonate” under the influence of magnetic energy, encased within carbon nanotubes. “We have good evidence that these new contrast agents have the potential to give us a big boost in imaging sensitivity, but how exactly we’ll use these nanotube-based agents and what role they will play in therapy is still an open question that we’re going to work to answer,” explains Lee.
For Jeff Bulte, Ph.D., an associate professor of radiology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, there is little doubt how nanoparticle-enabled imaging can help cancer therapy. Working with Carl Figdor, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in The Netherlands, Bulte has been testing the use of iron oxide nanoparticles to track how dendritic cells move through the body (See Nano.Cancer.Gov News).
Dendritic cells are candidates for triggering immune responses that would kill tumors, but for these cells to do their job they must first be injected into a patient’s lymph nodes. In fact, by labeling dendritic cells with magnetic nanoparticles and tracking them using MRI, the researchers found that interventional radiologists were successful only half the time at injecting these cells into lymph nodes and not into the surrounding tissues. “Now, with magnetic nanoparticles, we can use a widely available imaging method, MRI, to ensure that we’ve accurately delivered therapeutic cells to the exact spot where they can do their job,” says Bulte.
"source":[http://www.nsti.org/news/item.html?id=60].
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