A new brain cancer treatment, which has demonstrated its effectiveness in a mice study, is now providing hope to scientists, who believe it could help humans.
New research findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlighted that the medication– a gel–showed a 100% success rate in curing aggressive brain tumors in mice models, a report by John Hopkins University said.
Now, scientists hope this will help treat patients diagnosed with glioblastoma–one of the deadliest and most common brain tumors in humans.
Professor Honggang Cui of Johns Hopkins University, who was a part of the research, said the novel substance could well be the future of brain cancer treatment.
“Despite recent technological advancements, there is a dire need for new treatment strategies. We believe this hydrogel will be the future and will supplement current treatments for brain cancer,” he said, according to Talker.
Cui’s team combined an anticancer drug and an antibody in a solution, which self-assembled into a gel. The gel is designed to fill the tiny grooves left behind after brain surgery is performed to remove the benign cells. The gel can reach the sites that are inaccessible to surgery as well as standard drugs, and kill the residual cancer cells that will prevent carcinogenic cell growth in the long run.
The added benefit of the gel was that it helped build an immune response in a mouse’s body, which struggled to activate on its own while fighting glioblastoma.
To get to the bottom of things, scientists rechallenged the surviving mice models with glioblastoma and found their immune systems were strong enough to beat the cancer cells sans any added medication.
Still, researchers said the gel is best effective when it is preceded by surgery, adding that applying the gel alone yields only a 50% survival chance.
“The surgery likely alleviates some of that pressure and allows more time for the gel to activate the immune system to fight the cancer cells,” Cui…
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