Cancer tumors are not homogeneous, but rather have heterogeneities and areas of greater aggressiveness. Therefore, for effective treatment it is essential to take the sample within the most representative area. This innovative device patented by the IFIC allows directing the biopsy needle to the areas of greatest tumor activity.
It combines the ultrasound image with the gamma image, that is, it adds the metabolic information provided by the image from the radiotracers that are injected into patients to the morphological information provided by the ultrasound or ultrasound machines, detail the promoters of the initiative .
As Caballero explains in a statement, “the only way that currently exists to obtain this metabolic information is by injecting patients with a radiotracer, a substance with radioisotopes that emits gamma radiation when decaying.”
“This radioisotope, attached to glucose, is absorbed mainly by cancer cells, because its high replication rates require high energy consumption that, fundamentally, they extract from glucose”, he adds.
“Therefore, obtaining an image of the radiotracer distribution from gamma radiation provides information about intratumoral activity. Thus, integrating this metabolic information with the morphological information provided by the ultrasound scanner that is used to guide the A biopsy in breast cancer would allow the extraction of samples from the most active areas of the tumor and, therefore, improve the precision of this procedure and personalize the treatment in patients, “says Caballero.
THREE ADVANTAGES
Luis Caballero assures that “in the current market there is no such system as this, which also has three great advantages: due to its precision, it allows a customization of cancer treatment, it reduces the number of biopsies and its design makes it possible to adapt it to different current ultrasound systems. and, therefore, reduce costs and facilitate their insertion into the market. “
The type of companies that may be interested in this patent are both those that are already marketing ultrasound systems and wish to incorporate this molecular imaging technology, as well as the companies that are dedicated to molecular imaging in the field of nuclear medicine. The device is an international patent PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) that has already entered phases in both the United States, Japan and Australia.
In the opinion of the CSIC researcher, “at the moment, the objective would be to license the technology or constitute its own spin-off and be the promoters of the device.”
In addition to its application in biopsy guidance, this technology also opens up new perspectives in the techniques used in nuclear medicine, for example, in a recent technique that greatly improves prognosis and that consists of marking the lymph nodes themselves by means of insertion of the radioactive seed into the sentinel node for future identification after neoadjuvant chemotherapy treatment.
“This technique can be performed and controlled by means of the gamma image provided by our system as there is the possibility of supervising the deposition of the seed and being able to make sure that it is deposited in the sentinel node and not in another node”, he concludes .
The team of researchers from the Gamma and Neutron Spectroscopy Group of the Corpuscular Physics Institute (IFIC), which has patented this device to perform guided biopsies in real time, is led by researcher Luis Caballero and currently has funding for its development of the GAMUS projects of the Valoritza i Transfereix 2019 program of the University of Valencia, and MAGAS of the Valencian Innovation Agency (AVI) of the Generalitat Valenciana (INNVA1 / 2020/35).
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