( With an equal rate of incidence and mor...)Radiotherapy advance points way to noninvasive brain cancer treatment

Of the approximately 12,000 people who are diagnosed with GBM annually in the U.S., half will die within a year, and the rest within 3 years. Currently, the only treatments that stretch survival limits are exceptionally invasive surgeries to remove the tumor and radiation treatment with the maximum tolerated dose - all of which leads to a painfully low quality of life. Because of this, researchers are racing to find better therapies to stop or slow GBM.

In the Jan. 1, 2006 issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research, Gelsomina "Pupa" De Stasio, professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her colleagues report on research into using a new radiotherapy technique for fighting GBM with the element gadolinium. The approach might some day lead to less invasive treatment and possibly a cure of this disease.

"It's the most lethal cancer there is. The only good thing about it is that, if left untreated, death is relatively quick and pain-free, since this tumor does not form painful metastases in other parts of the body," says De Stasio. The therapy, called Gadolinium Synchrotron Stereotactic Radiotherapy (GdSSR), requires a gadolinium compound to find tumor cells and penetrate them, down into their nuclei, while sparing the normal brain. Then, the patient's head is irradiated with x-rays. For these x-ray photons the whole brain is transparent, while gadolinium is opaque. Then, where gadolinium is localized-in the nuclei of the cancer cells only-what's known as "the photoelectric effect" takes place.

"Exactly 100 years after Einstein first explained this effect, we have found a way to make it useful in medicine," De Stasio says. "In this effect, atoms absorb photons and emit electrons. The emitted electrons are very destructive for DNA, but ha
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Source:University of Wisconsin-Madison