Researchers at Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital created a microdevice that could help physicians pick the right treatments for glioma tumors.
Glioma tumors, which originate in the brain or spinal cord, are difficult to develop targeted therapies for because patients can be treated with only one approach at a time, according to a Sept. 5 hospital news release shared with Becker's. Researchers developed a device that works while the tumor is still in the body to experiment with the effects of drugs on the tumor microenvironment.
The device is implanted into a patient's tumor for two to three hours and administers doses of up to 20 drugs into small areas of the brain tumor. The device and surrounding tissue are then removed during the surgery and sent to a lab for analysis.
The device was tested on six patients in a phase 1 clinical trial, and the results published were in Science Translational Medicine. None of the patients experienced adverse effects from the device and researchers said they collected valuable biological data, including how the tumor responded to drug concentrations and what molecular changes each drug produced.
"It's important that we are able to do this in a way that best captures the features of each patient's tumor and, at the same time, is the least disruptive of the standard of care," corresponding author Pierpaolo Peruzzi, MD, PhD, an assistant professor at Brigham and Women's Hospital, said in the release. "This makes our approach easy to integrate into patients' treatment and allows its use in real life."