Engineers Eliminating Cancer With Electric Pulses
Biomedical engineers have developed a new method for destroying cancer cells which doesn’t require drugs or damage healthy tissue. The innovative process is called irreversible electroporation, or IRE, and it uses short intense electric pulses to create openings in the pores of cancer cells causing them to die.
IRE was invented by two engineers, Rafael V Davalos, from the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, and Boris Rubinsky, a bioengineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Heating and freezing is already used by oncologists to destroy tumors, but current techniques sometimes leave behind malignant cells or damage surrounding tissue. Using more precise technology, Davalos and Rubinsky have devised a way for IRE to kill a targeted area without affecting other nearby tissue or blood vessels. As Davalos explains,
“IRE shows remarkable promise as a minimally invasive, inexpensive surgical technique to treat cancer. It has the advantages that it is easy to apply, is not affected by local blood flow, and can be monitored and controlled using electrical impedance tomography.”
The researchers have already successfully used IRE to conduct ablation on liver cancer in rats and they are predicting clinical trials will begin soon on individuals with prostate cancer.
An article on IRE is scheduled for publication in the August 2007 special issue of Technology in Cancer Research and Treatment.
Source: Virginia Tech News
Tags: LLuis Mir; Institut Gustave Roussy; CNRS; Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science
Print This
|
| Sphere: Related Content
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Browse All Categories: Next article: Pro-Pharmaceuticals Reports Progress in Phase II Trials of Biliary Cancer Drug
Previous article: UCSF Video On Prostate Cancer
