A new imaging technique, which has been developed on an engineered version of the common cold virus, may (at some time in the next few years, but not soon) be able to assist in the early detection of lymph node positive prostate cancer. If this is the case, there is the potential for more effective treatment decisions for men with progressive disease. The initial data on this imaging technique was just published by Burton et al. in Nature Medicine.
The “New” Prostate Cancer InfoLink would like to emphasize the very early stage nature of this research. Although it is scientifically exciting, there will be many other steps before it can be demonstrated that such a technique is safe and sufficiently accurate for use in humans.
According to the senior author of the study, Dr. Lily Wu, quoted in The Washington Post, “It would represent a treatment advance in patients for whom outcome is not good. This would help improve the prognosis for these patients by letting us find and treat these metastases early. If we can catch the cancer before it invades other organs, we have a better chance to change the outcomes for these patients.”
It is well understood by most readers of The “New” Prostate Cancer InfoLink that patients whose prostate cancer has traveled to their lymph nodes are more likely to have a recurrence. Finding these tiny metastases in the pelvic lymph nodes is critical to future treatment decisions, yet it is also supremely difficult to do with conventional imaging techniques.
Burton et al. bioengineered a common cold virus with a specific genetic “payload” and designed it to travel directly to lymph nodes in mice and to express its payload only in prostate cells. The “payload” is a protein that can be picked up on positrom emisson tomography (PET) scans.
Filed under: Management, Treatment
