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news release:
Probe
to Detect Spread of Breast Cancer Co-developed by UH Scientist
Houston, TX, 5 March 2007: High-temperature
superconductors hold the key to a handheld tool for surgeons that promises to be
more accurate, cost-effective and safer than existing methods for staging and
treating various cancers, including breast cancer.
Audrius Brazdeikis, research assistant professor
of physics in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the
University of Houston, and
Quentin Pankhurst, a professor of physics from the University College of London
(UCL), have developed a
novel detection procedure combining nanotechnology and advanced magnetic sensing
based on high-temperature superconductors. Their innovation will enable surgeons
to more effectively locate the sentinel lymph node – the first lymph node to
which a tumor’s metastasizing cancer cells will drain.
The researchers produced an ultrasensitive
magnetic probe to detect minuscule magnetic fields in the body. The probe is a
supersensitive magnetometer – an instrument used to track the presence of
clinically introduced magnetic nanoparticles. During breast cancer surgery, a
surgeon will inject a magnetic nanoparticle dye, already approved as an imaging
contrast agent by the Food and Drug Administration, into the tumor or into
tissues surrounding the tumor.
Receiving a $250,000 grant to be used from 2004
to 2006 from the United Kingdom Department of Trade and Industry under the
UK-Texas Bioscience Collaboration Initiative, Brazdeikis and Pankhurst were
required to show “proof of concept” by building a device and showing it worked.
An ethics committee in the UK since has approved the detection procedure for a
clinical trial of women undergoing breast cancer surgery at University College
Hospital, London.
Dr. Michael Douek, a London surgeon who
specializes in breast surgery and is a senior lecturer at UCL, is overseeing the
trial and used the probe for the first time in surgery in December. Douek, who
visited Houston recently in preparation for the testing, said that the ethics
committee gave the hospital permission to use the probe in 10 surgeries and that
after a review of those procedures, the number could increase to 100.
“We expect to start new clinical trials in Japan
and Europe before the end of 2007,” Brazdeikis said. “Our technology will be
extensively validated by different surgeons in various countries.”
Brazdeikis, who heads the Biomedical Imaging
Group at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH (TcSUH), said a goal of
the grant was to commercialize biomedical technology developed at universities
through collaborative research. He and Pankhurst, deputy director of the London
Centre for Nanotechnology, have formed a medical devices company – Endomagnetics
Inc. – to bring their technology to the marketplace and patented the probe.
“The company plans to roll out the production of
the technology in 2008,” Brazdeikis said. “We hope that in the next two to three
years practice assisted with our new probe will become more widely adopted by
surgeons.”
Endomagnetics also already has garnered
recognition from such key world figures as England’s Prince Andrew, his
country’s special representative for international trade and investment, who
highlighted new technology developed by the nanotechnology industry at the Nano-TX
’06 conference in Dallas. He cited the UH-UCL collaboration and Endomagnetics’
as an “exciting example of the early stages of this kind of progress.”
“The partnership has resulted in a technology
used to locate lymph nodes for the staging and treatment of various forms of
cancer, including breast cancers and melanomas, and some of the more disfiguring
and demoralizing forms of cancer,” he said, according to a transcript of his
remarks.
“Although the technology has potential for use in
the staging and treatment of other cancers, including lung and prostate cancer,
the instrument needs to be customized for the type of surgery,” said Douek, who
has advised the researchers from the beginning of the probe’s development. “We
went through a whole series of different probes during the course of a year. I
was interested in being part of the project because of my interest in magnetic
resonance imaging. This is an extension of that technology.”
A surgeon holds the probe, which incorporates two
sets of coils connected to a sensor. One set of coils magnetizes the magnetic
particles, and the second detects the magnetic response from those particles.
The sensor, known as an HTS SQUID (or high-temperature superconducting quantum
interference device) is located in a cryogenic vessel on a cart and is submerged
in liquid nitrogen that cools the sensor to 77 K, equivalent to -320.5 F. The
system uses custom-built electronics and software on a laptop computer to give
the surgeon visual and audio feedback while tracking the magnetic nanoparticles
in the body.
“When breast cancer is diagnosed, and a tumor has
been located, a critically important issue is whether the cancer has spread to
other parts of the body – a process that occurs via the transport of metastatic
cancer cells through the lymphatic system,” Brazdeikis said. “The surgeon looks
for lymph nodes close to the cancer. They are not easy to find. The probe is a
tool for the surgeon to use during the surgery to locate the sentinel lymph
node.”
Existing practice calls for a breast cancer
patient to receive two preoperative injections – a radioactive isotope and a
blue dye – eight to 12 hours before surgery, frequently requiring
hospitalization the night before the operation. Later, in the operating room,
the surgeon uses a handheld gamma probe, aided by the visual observation of the
dye, to locate the lymph node with the highest radioactivity.
“Surgeons have a very small window of opportunity
to locate the lymphatic nodes that the cancer drains into,” Brazdeikis said.
“Our technology offers unprecedented quality and value of care benefits to
patients, doctors and hospital administrators over existing procedures.”
The UH-UCL technology allows a surgeon to
administer one injection – the magnetic dye that takes only 10 to 15 minutes to
work – and eliminates the need for a nuclear medicine practitioner to inject the
radioactive material. A patient thus may not have to be hospitalized while
waiting, and the technology eliminates unnecessary patient and surgeon exposure
to radioactivity.
“We introduce a paradigm-shifting new technology
for the staging and treatment of breast and other forms of cancer,” Brazdeikis
said. “It will be very appealing for surgeons to take this technology into their
practice.”
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