Brain Tumor Removal: Now Even Easier?

Medical Engineers at Duke University may have recently stumbled on to a discovery revolutionizing the science behind Brain Tumor Removal.

In short, the team discovered a way to create an ultrasound catheter small enough to fit in the larger blood vessels of the brain. This catheter has three key abilities: First, like all catheters, it can be used to send drugs and medicine into the body. Second, it can be used for imaging purposes, taking pictures of the brain's interior. Finally, it is able to increase the tempature in the localized area.

So what does all of this mumbo jumbo mean? The catheter can be used to send chemotherapy drugs encased in heat-sensitive liposomes into a brain, near the area of a brain tumor. Once those little drug-filled capsules are there, a simple burst of heat can cause the shell to deteriorate, releasing the drugs into the bloodstream, effectively taking out the tumor with localized chemotherapy.

Now, this research was done on animals and inert tissue samples, and it still has a long way to go before being usable on humans, but the implications of the proof-of-concept study are fairly far reaching. Chemotherapy, which is extremely ineffective on brain tumors (mostly because of the shear buildup of drugs needed to affect the brain without direct access), would become viable and localized: No more would the entire body suffer while the unhealthy growth is removed.

In addition, the relatively non-invasive nature of this new technique gives it a much greater versatility than surgery, which can only reach so far into the brain, without worrying about damaging the tissue.

The researchers behind the study do acknowledge some complications in the creation of an intracranial catheter, but assert that these can be overcome, with time and minimal difficulty.