A molecule in lizard saliva may make it easier to find certain tumors in the pancreas.
Insulinomas — benign tumors that can cause low blood sugar and sudden fainting spells — are notoriously hard to detect using current scanning methods. But by using a tweaked variant of a protein found in Gila monster saliva as a radioactive tracer, a new type of PET scan found the tumors in 95 percent of confirmed cases, researchers report in the October Journal of Nuclear Medicine. PET scans used now to detect such tumors had just a 65 percent success rate, the team found.
One of the main functions of the pancreas is to produce insulin, a hormone that keeps blood sugar levels in check (SN: 10/22/24). The task of making that insulin falls to specialized cells called beta cells. But sometimes these cells malfunction and form insulinomas. These tumors are rare, affecting just 1 to 4 people out of a million per year globally, but debilitating to those who have them.
“Many of [these tumors] are benign, very small and very efficient factories of insulin. They can cause you to have low blood sugar, which might even make you pass out or have a seizure,” says Peter Choyke, a cancer biologist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md. “Even when they’re very small, it’s very urgent to get to the diagnosis quickly and accurately, so that a surgeon can go in knowing exactly where the tumor is and remove just that.”
If doctors manage to find the tumors, surgically removing them cures the patients and lets them live a normal life. But finding the insulinomas is hard. Current methods of locating them include CT and MRI scans as well as PET scans that are used to find malignant pancreatic tumors, but can’t always detect the much smaller insulinomas. In a PET scan, doctors inject radioactive molecules…
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