New research has found that cooling brain tumors improves rates of survival, which offers hope for new options for treatment for patients suffering from difficult brain cancers. The most common type of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme, is a fast-growing and aggressive cancer that usually occurs in an individual’s spinal cord or brain. While this particular type of cancer can develop at any age, it is more common in older adults.
Surgery is usually the standard treatment for glioblastoma multiforme, followed by radiation and chemotherapy, as recommended by a patient’s oncologist. Despite these treatments, the rate of survival for this particular cancer is still poor, which highlights the need for alternative treatment options that may provide patients a better chance for long-term survival.
A team of researchers, led by Duke University’s Dr. Syed Faaiz Enam, have devised a new way to treat glioblastoma multiforme using cooler temperatures. The researchers used a device to locally cool tumor cells to 20o to 25oC, which led to a discovery that this could be used to impede cell growth in rats with glioblastoma multiforme.
The researchers also observed that most of the rats that received this treatment survived almost twice as long as the rats that didn’t receive the treatment. This is in addition to observing that the rats which underwent this treatment were also able to behave normally, eat and move around.
Cancer being treated using low temperatures is not a new idea. However, prior approaches have primarily used freezing, which damages the healthy tissues surrounding the tumor. The advantage of using localized cooling is that, unlike freezing, this approach uses temperatures that stop cell growth in tumors but does not pose a huge risk to healthy tissue in the brain. This aligns with the study’s findings, with the researchers noting in their report that they observed no damage to the surrounding brain tissue.
The researchers are now focused on testing their device further in more studies, with the hope that this technology will one day be made available to treat human patients suffering from glioblastoma multiforme. They also suggested that devices like this could even be modified to enable patients to continue receiving regular brain scans that would help their physicians monitor the growth of their tumors. At the moment, however, more work needs to be done.
The study’s findings were reported in the “Science Advances” journal.
As more discoveries and drug-development programs are instituted by various companies such as CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP), patients suffering from brain cancers can look forward to new treatments in the not-so-distant future.
NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP) are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/CNSP
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