Scientists invent tiny brain cancer device that is the size of a grain of rice and could treat glioblastomas that killed Beau Biden and John McCain

Neurosurgeons have developed a device the size of a grain of rice which they hope could be a breakthrough in the treatment of deadly brain cancers.

The 6mm-long device is implanted on the surface of tumors, where it releases drugs into the masses to shrink or kill them.

When implanted in difficult-to-treat brain tumors, the device can deliver several different anti-cancer drugs at the same time. It was tested on six patients with glioblastomas, the deadly brain cancer that killed President Joe Biden’s son, Joseph (Beau) Biden III, and Senator John McCain.

Most people with glioblastoma only live an average of 12 to 18 months after being diagnosed and only about seven percent are still alive after five years.

The development of the device is a response to the challenge of finding a specific way to treat cancer in the shortest time possible, given that drugs can usually only be tested one at a time, making finding the most effective treatment a process. long.

A challenge in developing targeted therapies for gliomas in the past is that it can be difficult to test multiple drug combinations on tumor cells because doctors can only treat patients with one method at a time, which represents a major barrier to the treatment of cancers such as gliomas, which Combination therapy has shown to be a promising treatment.

However, this small device could be the solution to this challenge because it can safely deliver up to 20 different anti-cancer drugs to extremely small areas of a patient’s brain tumor at the same time during brain surgery.

While the device was tested in patients with gliomas, researchers believe it could be used in multiple types of brain tumors, representing a major advance in cancer treatment.

The five-year survival rate for adults with brain cancer ranges from 21 to 72 percent.

Dr. Pierpaolo Peruzzi, a neurosurgeon at Brigham and Women’s who performed the surgeries, said: “To have the greatest impact on how we treat these tumors, we must be able to understand, from the beginning, which medication works best for a patient. certain”. .

«The problem is that the tools currently available to answer this question are not good enough.

“So we came up with the idea of ​​making each patient their own laboratory, using a device that can directly interrogate the live tumor and give us the information we need.”

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston focused their efforts on a type of brain cancer called gliomas, which affects cells in the central nervous system that protect crucial neurons.

Specifically, researchers aimed to find the best possible way to treat an extremely aggressive form of glioma called glioblastoma, the deadly brain cancer that killed President Joe Biden’s son, Joseph (Beau) Biden III, and Senator John McCain.

Working with six patients, they inserted tiny rod-shaped devices into their tumors, which release tiny doses of antitumor drugs in highly concentrated areas.

Intratumoral microdevices (IMDs) measure no more than six millimeters, about the size of a grain of rice or the tip of a pencil.

Each contains nine different medicationsalthough it could contain up to 20. One of the drugs loaded into the devices was temozolomide, a common chemotherapy drug that damages the DNA of cancer cells, preventing them from dividing and growing, and eventually killing them.

The rod-shaped devices were implanted as part of a standard procedure called resection to remove part or all of the cancerous mass. Dr. Peruzzi identified the tumor in each patient and implanted two devices in each approximately 10 to 15 mm apart at the start of surgery.

The IMDs remained in the tumor while Dr. Peruzzi worked to surgically remove the mass, giving the microdoses of medication two to three hours to work within the tumor.

Dr. Peruzzi said, “This is not in the laboratory or in a Petri dish.” “In fact, it happens in real patients in real time, giving us a whole new perspective on how these tumors respond to treatment.”

He then removed part or all of the tumor and the IMDs, which had been infusing parts of the tumor with nine different drugs.

From there, scientists on the team froze the removed mass with the devices placed on it and were able to see how effective they were at delivering concentrated doses of the drugs to extremely specific regions of the tumors.

“It’s important that we are able to do this in a way that best captures the characteristics of each patient’s tumor while least disrupting the standard of care,” Dr. Peruzzi said.

“This makes our approach easy to integrate into patient treatment and allows for real-life use.”

Their main goals were to determine whether the devices could be implanted safely and whether this type of medical technology could be expanded for use in treating the 15,000 Americans who will be diagnosed with glioblastoma this year.

Gliomas usually appear in the brain, but sometimes they can affect the spinal cord. Approximately one-third of all brain tumors are gliomas that originate from glial cells. These cells help support, connect and protect neurons in the central nervous system.

Gliomas do not usually travel outside the brain, but they are particularly dangerous because they can spread to other tissues within the brain. The most talked about form of glioma is called glioblastoma.

Neurosurgeons rate the growth of brain tumors on a scale of one to four: Grade 1 tumors grow slowly and appear the least aggressive, while Grade 4 tumors spread quickly and aggressively. Glioblastomas are automatically grade 4 tumors upon first diagnosis.

The deaths of Beau Biden and Sen McCain in 2015 and 2018, respectively, were due to highly aggressive glioblastomas. It took less than two years after diagnosis for glioblastoma to kill Biden, while Senator McCain died just over a year after his diagnosis.

Gliomas are notoriously difficult to treat, and chemotherapy, surgery and other interventions are often insufficient due to their tentacle-like ability to invade surrounding healthy brain tissue.

The next generation of cancer treatments will increasingly rely on a highly personalized approach that includes tools like Dr. Peruzzi’s to speed up the process of finding the right drug for each individual patient, optimizing their chances of survival.

Dr Peruzzi said: “The ability to bring the laboratory directly to the patient opens up great potential in terms of the type of information we can collect, which is exciting new territory for a disease that currently has very few options.” .