Paint for the tumor
Glowing dye can Help in cancer removal
Maria Krivochenko, Naked Science
A small area of cancerous tissue left by surgeons after the removal of the tumor greatly increases the risk of recurrence and spread of the disease. American researchers have found a way to avoid this. The glowing dye will help doctors see if there are sick cells in the patient's body.
The surgical margin is the boundary along which the incision was made during the removal of an organ or tumor. The purpose of the operation is to leave a clean or negative edge, that is, to cut out both the tumor and a small amount of tissue around it, so that the diseased cells are not exactly preserved in the body. When assessing how successful the operation was, problems may arise – modern methods are unreliable and time-consuming.
A group of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania in the USA, together with a team from the Perelman School of Medicine and Sunil Singhal from the Center for Precision Surgery at the Abramson Cancer Center, proposed using a dye that glows under near-infrared light. They took the indocyanine green (ICG) dye approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). For several years, they used it to separate healthy tissues from cancerous ones during operations on animals. Scientists believe that ICG accumulates in tumors because it seeps through the rapidly growing blood vessels in them.
The findings are published in the journal Plos One (Newton et al., Intraoperative near-infrared imaging can identify canine mammary tumors, a spontaneously occurring, large animal model of human breast cancer).
"Conducting this kind of research has two main advantages," says David Holt, a veterinarian and senior author of the paper. "Dogs serve as an excellent model for human breast cancer, but we can also bring real benefits to animals."
They removed breast tumors from 41 dogs; the owners of the animals agreed to participate in the experiments. The operations went on as usual, but the day before all the animals received an ICG injection.
Drawings from the press release of the University of Pennsylvania Glowing dye may aid in eliminating cancer - VM.
Surgeons examined wounds and surgical edges under near-infrared light to find traces of dye. They could not detect the "dirty" edges and noticed that this method allows you to see cancer that has spread to the lymph nodes. "We have shown that we can identify both draining lymph nodes and lymph nodes with metastatic disease," says Holt.
Today, radioisotopes are injected into the human chest to determine draining, or "sentinel", lymph nodes. "If you use near-infrared imaging tools (for example, ICG), radiotherapy will not be required. "If we could give an injection before surgery that would only reveal potentially problematic lymph nodes, we would avoid a big risk of either removing too many of them or leaving those with metastatic disease," Holt explained.
Studies on the effectiveness and safety of this method are ongoing. But doctors believe that in the future he will be able to help patients with breast cancer who would like to keep their breasts after surgery.
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