According to the Medical News Today, one of the challenges with extracting brain tumors is making sure that no cancerous tissue remains so they do not regrow. Currently, a new study commits to lessen this problem - scientists have identified a way to emphasize a protein on brain scans so the edges of a tumor can be recognized more precisely.
The study, which proposes scientists the most outright picture of brain tumors yet, was done by a team from the University of Oxford in the UK, and was conferred on Monday at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference 2015, in Liverpool, UK.
The edges of a tumor consist of the most intrusive cancer cells. For surgery or radiation therapy to be successful, doctors require good maps that display not only where the tumor is located in the brain, but also where its edges are - a clear description between cancerous and healthy tissue.
This is significant not only in order to extract all the cancerous tissue, but also because the most intrusive cells are at the edge of a tumor, as one of the researchers, Cancer Research UK scientist Nicola Sibson, and a professor in the Institute for Radiation Oncology at Oxford would explain it:
If they can't detect the edge of the tumor, surgery and radiotherapy often declines to extract aggressive tumor cells - and the brain tumor can grow back.
Presently, on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, you can observe where the brain tumor is, but its edges are blurred. This is because the MRI detects leaky blood vessels inside the tumor. However, on the edges of the tumor, the blood vessels are all in one piece, so they are not presented as clearly on the scans.
Meanwhile, Medical News Today recently studied how a new evidence about chemo-resistance in tumors could develop cancer treatments. The study, presented in the journal Cancer Cell, encloses the role of a molecular mechanism that supports cells with damaged DNA to restore their DNA but does not generate cell death if the DNA deterioration is unrepairable.
