Could A Tracing Compound Reveal Treatment-Resistant Tumours?

One of the most important parts of any cancer treatment is diagnosis, which starts with effective, regular medical imaging techniques.

These help to show the location of tumours, but cannot always be used to diagnose a cancerous tumour’s characteristics, something that can fundamentally change the types of treatment that are suitable for a patient.

Given that some forms of cancer treatment such as chemotherapy take a long time, a delay caused by a treatment-resistant tumour could be potentially life-threatening.

However, a team at King’s College London led by Tim Witney, believe that they might have found a solution by taking advantage of a system regularly used for clinical trials known as a radiotracer.

A radioactive tracer is commonly used to trace biochemical reactions such as metabolic processes, but using a molecule that is designed to target a tumour-associated protein named xCT, researchers noticed that cancer cells resistant to treatment would light up brighter on imaging systems.

This means that it could reduce the amount of time it takes to see if an aggressive cancerous growth is resistant to treatment from 12 weeks to a matter of hours.

Given that with aggressive cancers time is everything, this means that months might no longer be wasted with treatments that are ultimately found to be unnecessary, allowing for contingencies for treatment resistance to be used as soon as possible to ensure they are at their most effective.

This not only has a lot of benefits in terms of treatment prognosis but also in terms of the mental health of patients, who all too often are left devastated and worried that the treatment they have endured for months at a time has been meaningless.

It also potentially could provide even more hope for the future, as a type of targeted therapy known as antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) could be used to selectively kill the resistant cells without harming healthy tissue alongside it.