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Bonus!
And histotripsy’s potential benefits go beyond tumor destruction. In the last year, a pair of preclinical studies in rodents suggest that in the clean-up process, the immune system learns how to identify cancer cells as threats. This can enable the body to continue fighting the initial tumor and help activate a natural immune response to the cancer.
This would really be a game changer.
Hopefully, but I thought one of the major obstacles of getting a person’s immune system to fight cancer was that it has caused it to then attack healthy cells as well
Is there something unique about this approach that makes this less likely, or is my initial understanding of the problem wrong?
This could be a very ironic treatment for alcoholic musicians.
Or ultrasound techs
Let the bass cannon kick it
nice. so basically the same principle we currently use for non-invasive kidney stone breaking.
Why would the sound waves only target the tumor and not everything else?
They basically bounce the sound waves off a parabolic mirror, so that they come from multiple directions but converge on one spot. The spot where they converge is the only place where the sound waves are strong enough to cause cavitation.
This is actually a fairly mature technology that has been used to treat kidney stones for decades (lithotripsy).
This is my non expert opinion but based on what I know about sound waves I think this is how they are doing it. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chip in with more sources.
It looks like you can target and focus the sound waves to converge and only be strong enough to trigger the cavitation effect in tumorous areas . The cavitation creates tiny bubbles and damage the tissue only in the focus area.
It’s similar to how radiotherapy works in that it’s concentrated damage in a targeted area, but less much less damaging to other tissue that it passes through.
Sound waves shouldn’t be as harmful as radiation sources, so it could be a great addition to the arsenal if it proves effective.
The sound waves are focused onto the tumor, so they only have enough energy to damage tissue there, and not anywhere else.
Think about focusing the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass; they’re only concentrated enough to burn at a very small area. The focused ultrasound is similar, although they’re probably using some form of phased array to get the equivalent effect.
It’s a good technology, but from what I’ve read the tumors tend to grow back. Need to still be paired with chemo I think
But even as an adjuvant treatment it could potentially decrease the need for chemo- or radiotherapy if a good chunk of the tumor can be destroyed beforehand.
