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By Patricia Reaney
LONDON, Mar 26 (Reuters) - British scientists said on Monday they had used ultrasound to assess which cancer patients were most likely to develop drug resistance--a finding that could improve the treatment and cure rates of many sufferers.
Instead of painful biopsies to measure the number of blood vessels in a sample of a tumour to get an idea of how it would respond to a drug, Dr Michael Seckl of Hammersmith Hospital in London said he and a colleague had used ultrasound to look at the blood source of the entire tumour.
It was less invasive, did not hurt as much as a biopsy and the equipment was already available in most hospitals, Seckl said in a telephone interview.
"It is the first time that we have been able to prove that ultrasound works as an independent prognostic factor over everything else we are using," he said.
Using ultrasound they were able accurately to predict the development of drug resistance in patients before they started treatment.
"The discovery that such a common technique--ultrasound--can help in the fight against cancer will hopefully mean better treatment and cure rates for patients with this common disease," Seckl said.
Although Seckl, who will present his findings to a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in New Orleans on Monday, tested it on women with a rare type of pregnancy-related cancer, he believes it will work with most cancers in organs with a main blood supply like the womb, kidney, ovaries and testicles.
"This is a groundbreaking study which should pave the way for other people, and ourselves, to go and look at these other types of cancer and see if we can get the same type of information," said Seckl.
He and his colleague, Dr Jo Boultbee, took ultrasound scans of 164 women with gestational trophoblastic tumours, a rare pregnancy-related cancer, before the women started treatment. They correctly identified the 47 who developed drug resistance.
Ultrasound is commonly used during pregnancy to take images of the developing foetus and to assess the status of organs in the body.
"We look at the blood flow in the main artery supplying the tumour so we have a measure of the total blood flow to the tumour," Seckl said.
The higher the blood flow and the number of blood vessels to the tumour, the more likely it would become resistant to the treatment.
Knowing whether a patient would develop resistance would allow doctors to tailor treatment to an individual and to use a combination of drugs instead of just one.
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