This technique could lead to personalized medicine.

"In many ways this has been a holy grail for brain tumor therapy," Leuthardt said. "Having the ability to monitor the changing molecular events of the tumor in an ongoing way allows us to not only better diagnose a tumor in the brain, but to follow its response to different types of treatment."


"Once the blood-brain barrier is open, physicians can deliver drugs to the brain tumor," Chen said. "Physicians can also collect the blood and detect the expression level of biomarkers in the patient. It enables them to perform molecular characterizations of the brain tumor from a blood draw and guide the choice of treatment for individual patients."

In addition, Gavin Dunn, MD, assistant professor of neurosurgery, a co-author and leader in cancer immunobiology, plans to use the technique with immunotherapy, which offers precision treatment that targets specific biomarkers in the brain.

"This noninvasive focused ultrasound-enabled liquid biopsy technique can be useful for long-term monitoring of brain cancer treatment response, where repeated surgical tissue biopsies may not be feasible," Chen said. "Meanwhile, variations within tumors pose a significant challenge to cancer biomarker research. Focused ultrasound can precisely target different locations of the tumor, thereby causing biomarkers to be released in a spatially-localized manner and allow us to better understand the spatial variations of the tumor and develop better treatment."

The team continues to work to refine the process. The future will require integration with advanced genomic sequencing and bioinformatics to enable even more refined diagnostics. These efforts are being led by co-authors, Allegra Petti, assistant professor of medicine, and Xiaowei Wang, associate professor of radiation oncology.

"Our ongoing work is to optimize the technique and evaluate its sensitivity and safety," Chen said.

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