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Scientists looking to improve the next generation of cancer treatments have developed a way of
using ultrasound to deliver high-potency cancer drugs directly to a tumour.
In the process, they have killed two birds with one stone: developing a method of tracking the drug's progress through the body, and using ultrasound "tweezers" to guide it to where it's needed, thereby minimising chemotherapy side effects.
The method, says Qifa Zhou, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, hinges on the use of microbubbles, long used in imaging blood flow in coronary arteries.
Because these bubbles reflect ultrasound beautifully, cardiologists are able to use them to produce ultrasound images sharp enough to reveal dangerous coronary blockages.
If such bubbles are filled with chemotherapy drugs, they can be tracked the same way, Zhou says: a major improvement on other ways of tracking drug delivery, such as radioactive tracers, which can carry risk to the patient.
"Ultrasound has been used for 40 years," Zhou says. "It's safe and easy."
And, once the bubbles have reached the right location, all that's needed to get the drug out of them is to turn up the ultrasound intensity. That makes them pop, releasing their contents exactly when and where desired.
But that's just the beginning.
Comment: This is just the latest in reappearances from 'extinct' species: