JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY -- A new Johns Hopkins study offers promise towards someday being able to non-invasively examine changes in cancerous tumors to determine whether they'll respond to radiation treatment, before treatment even begins.
The findings, published Feb. 28 in Cancer Research, can potentially help identify subsets of patients that are best suited for radiation treatment, thereby reducing medical overtreatment and helping patients avoid the adverse effects of radiation.
"Our eventual hope is to be able to predict a patient's response before radiation therapy even begins, thus sparing patients whose tumors can't be treated with radiation from going through the arduous multi-week process, saving them both time and money," says Ishan Barman, a Johns Hopkins University assistant professor of mechanical engineering and one of the study's corresponding authors.
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In typical radiation therapy, small doses of radiation are delivered over a period of five to seven weeks and there's currently no definitive way of determining treatment response before or in the early weeks of therapy. The earliest clinicians can examine tumor shrinkage is two to three weeks after therapy with CT and MRI scans.
While other studies have investigated molecular changes in tumors as a way to preemptively identify tumors that won't respond to radiation treatment, the researchers say their study is unique because they studied multiple types of cancers and used smaller doses of radiation, which more accurately reflects current radiation therapy practices.
"Previous researchers used a single large dose of radiation, resulting in biomolecular changes that don't accurately mimic the subtle changes caused by smaller doses delivered over longer periods of time," says Santosh Paidi, a Johns Hopkins University mechanical engineering graduate research assistant and the study's first author.
In this study, the Johns Hopkins, University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences researchers used Raman spectroscopy, a method which uses light from a laser to examine how molecules vibrate, to characterize the changes in the biochemical composition of the tumor and its environment. This method, the researchers say, requires only a low-power laser and doesn't need any additional sample preparation; such technologies enable holistic examination of the complex biological processes of radiation treatment.
