While a variety of cancer medications are in existence and often work incredibly well, picking ones that are effective on the individual patients’ tumors is usually like pinning a tail on a donkey. Researchers at MIT have developed a device that may offer a way of testing cancer drugs within the body before administering the full dose of what will probably work.
The technology is essentially a tiny implantable container with compartments holding miniscule amounts of different cancer drugs. When injected into a tumor, the implant releases the drugs around itself so that nearby slices of the tumor are infused by different drugs.
Being able to visualize how the various slices are affected by the drugs gives a good indication of which drugs will work on the cancer as a whole. The researchers tested the technique on mice who had grafts of three different human cancers implanted into them, showing that the system is pretty accurate at predicting what works.
