Mount Sinai Hospital
via Wikimedia Commons
via Wikimedia Commons
Mount Sinai first in U.S. to utilize LUMI Bead liver cancer treatment
March 30, 2016
by Jennifer Rioux, Contributing Reporter
Mount Sinai Hospital is now the first hospital in the country to offer a cutting-edge treatment for liver cancer. The treatment — performed with M1 LUMI Bead technology — involves injecting chemotherapy-filled beads into the wrists of patients with difficult-to-treat liver cancer.
The radiopaque beads are threaded into the blood vessels that lead to the tumor and through imaging technology oncologists can target the delivery of chemotherapy by viewing the exact location of the beads to confirm that they are in the correct place to block the flow of blood to the tumor, thereby shrinking its size.
With conventional treatment you can’t see where the chemotherapy is going, so you assume that it’s going to the right place. But there are systemic side effects and patients can get sick, Dr. Edward Kim, Mount Sinai's Director of Interventional Oncology and Associate Professor of Radiology and Surgery in the Division of Interventional Radiology, told HCB News.
By using CT images generated on a fluoroscopy table you can see where it is targeting and you know where the beads are going. “If there is an additional feeding vessel that you may not be aware of, you can see exactly where the beads are going and you know you are missing a portion of the tumor," said Kim. "You can treat that vessel at the time instead of at follow-up at four weeks.”
Based on data from about 10 years ago, advances in technology from injective treatment have netted a response rate historically between 55 and 60 percent. “With bead technology that objective response rate should be better,” says Kim, “but we need to do phase two or three RCT looking at several years, multiple countries, in excess of 500 patients, to get the data we need.”
The bead technology is currently approved for use in hypervascular liver tumors and all metastatic disease in the liver, but there is potential for accurate targeting of various tumors of a vascular nature throughout the body.
Kim would like to design a phase three trial and correlate the targeting with objective response to help determine whether this innovative technology leads to improved overall survival in those patient groups.
Additionally, he believes the radiopaque bead treatment will improve quality of life measures related to the most common side effects of chemotherapy, like pain, fatigue, and amount of time spent in bed post-treatment.
This technology was first utilized in January and February 2016 on approximately 10 patients and it just became available to the mass market last week. A multi-center randomized controlled trial was conducted in Europe several years ago using the bead technology, but not radiopaque, and the side effect profile of patients receiving the treatment was very similar on follow-up.
The radiopaque beads are threaded into the blood vessels that lead to the tumor and through imaging technology oncologists can target the delivery of chemotherapy by viewing the exact location of the beads to confirm that they are in the correct place to block the flow of blood to the tumor, thereby shrinking its size.
With conventional treatment you can’t see where the chemotherapy is going, so you assume that it’s going to the right place. But there are systemic side effects and patients can get sick, Dr. Edward Kim, Mount Sinai's Director of Interventional Oncology and Associate Professor of Radiology and Surgery in the Division of Interventional Radiology, told HCB News.
By using CT images generated on a fluoroscopy table you can see where it is targeting and you know where the beads are going. “If there is an additional feeding vessel that you may not be aware of, you can see exactly where the beads are going and you know you are missing a portion of the tumor," said Kim. "You can treat that vessel at the time instead of at follow-up at four weeks.”
Based on data from about 10 years ago, advances in technology from injective treatment have netted a response rate historically between 55 and 60 percent. “With bead technology that objective response rate should be better,” says Kim, “but we need to do phase two or three RCT looking at several years, multiple countries, in excess of 500 patients, to get the data we need.”
The bead technology is currently approved for use in hypervascular liver tumors and all metastatic disease in the liver, but there is potential for accurate targeting of various tumors of a vascular nature throughout the body.
Kim would like to design a phase three trial and correlate the targeting with objective response to help determine whether this innovative technology leads to improved overall survival in those patient groups.
Additionally, he believes the radiopaque bead treatment will improve quality of life measures related to the most common side effects of chemotherapy, like pain, fatigue, and amount of time spent in bed post-treatment.
This technology was first utilized in January and February 2016 on approximately 10 patients and it just became available to the mass market last week. A multi-center randomized controlled trial was conducted in Europe several years ago using the bead technology, but not radiopaque, and the side effect profile of patients receiving the treatment was very similar on follow-up.