This entry is a follow up to tonight's Health Alert Medical Breakthroughs story, about a new tool that can help doctors figure out if chemo is helping breast cancer patients - within days.
If you missed the story, here it is. The additional information is below. I hope it's helpful. It sounds like this device could save a lot of cancer patients the wear and tear of chemo, if indeed it isn't working.
Tracking Breast Cancer Treatment
TORONTO (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Many breast cancer patients endure harsh rounds of chemotherapy only to find out their bodies don't respond. Doctors can use scans and physical exams to determine if a particular chemo is working, but that can take months. A new tool can tell women if their treatment is working within days.
Joanne Nevison was calm after learning she had breast cancer. Then, she talked to her surgeon.
"That's when reality hit home, and she told me my whole breast is pretty much cancer," Nevison says.
She started chemotherapy. But Greg Czarnota, M.D., Ph.D., a radiation oncologist at Odette Cancer Centre with the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, says it can take months to know if a particular type of chemo is effective.
"Potentially, up to 70 percent of the people receiving this type of chemotherapy may not be deriving a benefit," Dr. Czarnota says.
Now, he's studying a device that uses light-scattering technology to track treatment.
"Rather than giving someone six months of ineffective chemotherapy and then you run out of time because the disease has progressed, you may be able to very quickly switch it to a type of chemotherapy that works," Dr. Czarnota says.
The laser scans the breast to determine metabolic activity in the tissue. Instead of months, the laser can reveal if chemo is working within days.
"To be able to have this technology and use it to customize someone's chemotherapy could mean, to be honest, [the difference] between life and death," Dr. Czarnota says.
After just seven days of treatment, it's clear Nevison's chemo is working.
"I think it's the way of the future," Dr. Czarnota says.
After her first round of chemo, Nevison had a mastectomy. She's now getting a second round to keep her cancer in check.
"Thank God for all this research and technology that they have," she says.
Nevison is thankful she was in the study and hopes more women will soon benefit from the research.
The technology is already approved in Canada to diagnose cancer, but it is still under study as a way to track how well treatment is working. Dr. Czarnota says the Canadian-based company that developed the device expects to have centers in the United States involved with the next phase of the tracking study.
New Information: This technology is called SoftScan. It's an optical breast imaging system that uses light-scattering technology to track whether or not chemotherapy is working. It uses a laser to measure metabolic activity in the breast and can tell whether or not the tumor is growing. Dr. Czarnota says, "If you have an area in the tumor that's growing rapidly, it probably has a high concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin because it's growing, and that's one of the things we can detect." The potential of the technology is that it can tell doctors and women within days of starting treatment whether or not they're getting the appropriate chemotherapy. Dr. Czarnota says, "Rather than giving someone six months of ineffective chemotherapy and then you run out of time because the disease has progressed, you may be able to very quickly switch it to a type of chemotherapy that works."
IT'S STILL EARLY: Dr. Czarnota is still in the initial testing phase of the SoftScan technology. The study will enroll between 10 and 20 patients in Canada and then as the research progresses, a larger study will likely include multiple centers throughout North America. The technology is currently used as a new tool in the detection and diagnosis of breast cancer, but its use in tracking treatment is new. Dr. Czarnota says, "We believe that is new and innovative and an even more powerful use of this type of technology."
