Another interesting advancement in personalized medicine, this time by researchers at MIT.
They've developed a new implanted device that can carry small doses of up to 30 different types of drugs into a tumor and allow doctors to release them into the tissue to measure how effective each one is at killing the cancer cells.
"Such a device could eliminate much of the guesswork now involved in choosing cancer treatments" according to an article about the device on Medical Design Technology, quoting Oliver Jonas, a postdoc at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and lead author of a paper describing the device in the April 22 issue ofScience Translational Medicine.
It can be implanted in the tumor using a biopsy needle. It is made from a stiff, crystalline polymer and is about the size of a grain of rice.
According to the article, after a day, the device, along with a sample of the tumor is removed. Then, researchers determine the impact of the drugs by analyzing the tumor.
"The approach that we thought would be good to try is to essentially put the lab into the patient," said Jonas. "It's safe and you can do all of your sensitivity testing in the native microenvironment."
