Medical oncologists and their support staff play a vital role in the overall well-being of patients. This role includes a wide array of services from medical research to improving patient care.
Because cancer is such a complex disease, the medical oncology team must include surgeons, radiation oncologists and holistic physicians to provide the best possible overall care to the cancer patient.
New methods to aid cancer diagnosis and treatment are being developed at a rapid pace. Here is a look at some of the latest research in oncology.
Since cancer cells thrive with a lack of oxygen, an MRI sensor that can monitor oxygen levels can be used to track what is happening in a tumor. Researchers at the MIT-Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research have invented an injectable device that can read oxygen levels, and the results can be read with an MRI. By reading the oxygen levels, researchers hope it is a new way to track if and how well patients are responding to treatment.
Until recently, video game processors — also known as GPUs (graphic processing units) — were used solely as the engine behind intensive video game applications. However, medical physicists at the UT Southwestern Medical Center, are using the astonishingly fast speed associated with these processors to significantly reduce the time required to calculate the radiation dose delivered to a tumor.
In fact, the processors can reduce the calculation time from about 70 hours to just 10 seconds. What this means to patients is that the treatment can be based on calculations over a much shorter time span, making the information and the corresponding treatment much more accurate.
The digital age has also greatly improved cancer tissue analysis. It can often take weeks for a histologist to evaluate cancer tissue and send back all of the results. But a new method using mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) can scan a sample and produce a pixelated image that can reveal the thousands of chemicals in that part of the sample. A single test taking a few hours can provide much more detailed information than a standard histological test.
The studies, done at the Imperial College of London, expect that using MSI analysis will show not only if a tissue is cancerous, but also the type and subtype of cancer, thus helping to choose the best treatment. While the interpretation of this pixelated data can be complex, researchers are also working on translating the information so that it will be more easily interpreted in a clinic.
Personalizing cancer therapy has become a goal of many researchers in this area — including new testing methods, DNA sequencing, targeted gene therapy and tumor-specific treatments.
With that in mind,a group at the UC San Diego and the Moores Cancer Center used a new type of advisory group called the molecular tumor board. This board is comprised of experts in the fields of tumor genetics, basic science, math and information gathering, as well as oncologists and radiation specialists, whose sole purpose is to evaluate the patients who have had targeted personal cancer treatment.
This kind of evaluation, especially for patients with advanced cancers, will help them get better access to more specific clinical trials and to drugs targeted to their disease.
