29 July 2009
A Monash University PhD student has led the way in research using a new scanning technique to reduce the time taken to identify the extent of a cancer patient's response to treatment.
Sarah Everitt, a PhD student in medical imaging and radiation services in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences is also working at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. She said the technique could reduce the amount of time to assess the effectiveness of treatment to just weeks.
"Usually, when we're planning radiation therapy for these patients, they would receive 30 treatments over six weeks. But throughout that time, we don't actually know if the treatment is working and need to wait until a couple of months later to monitor them," she says.
The new scanning technique uses a combination of hi-tech scanners with a new type of radioactive "tracer" called FLT (18F-3'-deoxy-3'-fluoro-l-thymidine) which is injected into the patients. The tracer then binds to the rapidly dividing cells and these are highlighted during a scan.
Ms Everitt said the technique had the potential to revolutionise the way cancers are treated.
"We're doing the scans in the second and fourth week of treatment and hope to find out when the most informative time might be for scanning patients in the future. There's evidence that some lung tumours may start to grow very quickly towards the end of treatment, so [at four weeks] we've also got two weeks to adapt the treatment if we observe this biological response," Ms Everitt said.
The initial trials are being conducted on lung-cancer patients and five patients have taken part in the year-long study during which scans were done regularly. With the knowledge that FLT can be seen in patients during their treatment, the next phase of this study is now underway with an additional 20 patients.
The technique/investigational tool could potentially provide doctors with enough information about a patient's progress to tailor treatments for each patient.
Lung cancer remains one of Australia's leading causes of death, and despite the regular contact with patients experiencing such a bleak illness, Ms Everitt finds the human interaction in her work rewarding.
"You really do see an amazing side of people working in this field," she says.
"It's something that I didn't anticipate (in this research project). Some people experience quite severe treatment induced side-effects, and they've told me that it really encourages them to persevere with the treatment because the tumour is actually responding, even though it can be pretty hard going to come in every day."
For more information please contact Samantha Blair, Media and Communications + 61 3 9903 4841 or +61 439 013 951.
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