And histotripsy’s potential benefits go beyond tumor destruction. In the last year, a pair of preclinical studies in rodents suggest that in the clean-up process, the immune system learns how to identify cancer cells as threats. This can enable the body to continue fighting the initial tumor and help activate a natural immune response to the cancer.
Hopefully, but I thought one of the major obstacles of getting a person’s immune system to fight cancer was that it has caused it to then attack healthy cells as well
Is there something unique about this approach that makes this less likely, or is my initial understanding of the problem wrong?
It is a general obstacle. Cancer cells are basically normal cells have mutated in such a way that they a) still survive, b) subdivide rampantly and c) fly under the radar of white blood cells, which normally pick up and deal with said anomalies before they become a problem.
So the trick is about getting white blood cells to detect amd attack anomalies that it previously wouldn't, while not attacking healthy cells.
Maybe I’m extrapolating incorrectly - I think that’s an obstacle because of all the news articles in the past talking about novel ways to targetedly mark cancer cells as the bad ones, and all the discussion of cancer and autoimmune disease being similar
I’m no expert, but I am familiar with the concept of “tuning” the immune system to recognize cancerous cells via pharmaceuticals. Some of these treatments may cause the immune system to attack healthy tissue. I don’t know if this is still the case.
I think the difference here is that the sound treatment causes the initial disruption to the cells, and then the immune system realizes (on its own) that the cells are a threat. Then, the immune system can start attacking the bad cells.
Since the sound treatment is approved by the FDA, I assume it’s safe, and it’s awesome news
I can’t tell if the article is misunderstanding the science when they say it might help the immune system target the cancer cells in the future, though
Most of the time I see news about it being promising in lab rats, it doesn’t work in humans - which isn’t a failing of science, it’s a failing of the media IMO
They basically bounce the sound waves off a parabolic mirror, so that they come from multiple directions but converge on one spot. The spot where they converge is the only place where the sound waves are strong enough to cause cavitation.
This is actually a fairly mature technology that has been used to treat kidney stones for decades (lithotripsy).
This is my non expert opinion but based on what I know about sound waves I think this is how they are doing it. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chip in with more sources.
It looks like you can target and focus the sound waves to converge and only be strong enough to trigger the cavitation effect in tumorous areas . The cavitation creates tiny bubbles and damage the tissue only in the focus area.
It’s similar to how radiotherapy works in that it’s concentrated damage in a targeted area, but less much less damaging to other tissue that it passes through.
Sound waves shouldn’t be as harmful as radiation sources, so it could be a great addition to the arsenal if it proves effective.
The sound waves are focused onto the tumor, so they only have enough energy to damage tissue there, and not anywhere else.
Think about focusing the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass; they’re only concentrated enough to burn at a very small area. The focused ultrasound is similar, although they’re probably using some form of phased array to get the equivalent effect.
But even as an adjuvant treatment it could potentially decrease the need for chemo- or radiotherapy if a good chunk of the tumor can be destroyed beforehand.
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