> “In one patient, we destroyed 96 percent of the tumor cells” that crossed the laser beam, says Zharov.
Just want to clarify: tumors will generally drop hundreds of thousands to millions of cells into the blood stream on a daily basis. Most of the circulating tumor cells are already unlikely to become mets at baseline, and by the time you've found a tumor you've already seeded these cells in a number of locations throughout the body. This seeding usually occurs long before we can detect the primary tumor. We get "metastasis" when a number of other factors come into play that allow a particular CTC / bundle of CTCs to start growing into a met. For those interested, R. Weinberg's text on cancer is pretty much the authority, and he discusses this at length.
As it exists, as a therapy, it's for catching some of the horses that are making it out of the barn - after the doors have been open for a while.
To be useful as a therapy, we'd need something that can be worn 24/7 - if I catch a tumor that needs to be excised, I'd put it on your arm, and use it to deplete the circulating population to reduce the likelihood of metastasis happening in the period between detection and excision. And I'd need an RCT to show me that this is actually going to result in a reduction of metastasis, since there's every likelihood that the eventual met won't come from the CTCs seeded in the period between detection and excision.
Don't get me wrong; I'm happy to see more ways to detect and kill tumor cells. But this is still many steps away from becoming a technology with clinical application. At this stage, its relationship to useful cancer therapy is the relationship between my laser pointer from ten years ago and a sci-fi laser pistol.
What this is cool as, is as a mechanism for helping detect cancers. I'm all for having something I can slap on your arm and let me know if you've got melanoma brewing, rather than having a dermatologist manually inspect all your crevices for an overlooked mole.
> “In one patient, we destroyed 96 percent of the tumor cells” that crossed the laser beam, says Zharov.
Just want to clarify: tumors will generally drop hundreds of thousands to millions of cells into the blood stream on a daily basis. Most of the circulating tumor cells are already unlikely to become mets at baseline, and by the time you've found a tumor you've already seeded these cells in a number of locations throughout the body. This seeding usually occurs long before we can detect the primary tumor. We get "metastasis" when a number of other factors come into play that allow a particular CTC / bundle of CTCs to start growing into a met. For those interested, R. Weinberg's text on cancer is pretty much the authority, and he discusses this at length.
As it exists, as a therapy, it's for catching some of the horses that are making it out of the barn - after the doors have been open for a while.
To be useful as a therapy, we'd need something that can be worn 24/7 - if I catch a tumor that needs to be excised, I'd put it on your arm, and use it to deplete the circulating population to reduce the likelihood of metastasis happening in the period between detection and excision. And I'd need an RCT to show me that this is actually going to result in a reduction of metastasis, since there's every likelihood that the eventual met won't come from the CTCs seeded in the period between detection and excision.
Don't get me wrong; I'm happy to see more ways to detect and kill tumor cells. But this is still many steps away from becoming a technology with clinical application. At this stage, its relationship to useful cancer therapy is the relationship between my laser pointer from ten years ago and a sci-fi laser pistol.
What this is cool as, is as a mechanism for helping detect cancers. I'm all for having something I can slap on your arm and let me know if you've got melanoma brewing, rather than having a dermatologist manually inspect all your crevices for an overlooked mole.