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Test can quickly tell if chemotherapy working

SUNCOAST NEWS STAFF REPORT

Published: April 22, 2009

Modern chemotherapy drugs can stop deadly malignancies in their tracks or add months or years to the lives of cancer patients. Or they can inflict months of nausea, vomiting, hair loss and other significant side effects without having any impact on the disease.

Researchers at UCLA say they have developed a test that can quickly tell with one type of malignancy when anti-cancer drugs are working and when they're not. If they are right, doctors may be able to quickly switch patients to more effective treatment methods

In an article in the April 15 issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research, Dr. Fritz Eilber and his colleagues at the UCLA Jonsson Cancer Center report positron emission tomography can detect how well cancer chemotherapy is working by measuring how fast cancer cells are burning up sugar.

"There's no point in giving a patient a treatment that isn't working," Eilber says. "These treatments make patients very sick and have long-term serious side effects."

In general, cancer cells consume sugar much faster than normal cells. This higher rate of sugar metabolism makes cancer cells give off a much brighter glow under PET scanning than noncancerous cells when fed a tracer molecule, a special form of sugar known as fluorodeoxyglucose.

The UCLA team also used computed tomography, or CT, scans in assessing the effectiveness of the anti-cancer treatment.

Traditionally, doctors begin chemotherapy and wait a number of months before trying to assess how effective the treatment is working. Using its method, the UCLA team says, it can tell in as little as a week if anti-cancer drugs are working.

The UCLA team says it judges chemotherapy as effective if it sees at least a 35 percent decrease in tumor cells metabolic activity.

Of a group of 50 patients with a form of cancer known as high-grade soft tissue sarcomas tested by the UCLA team while undergoing chemotherapy prior to surgery, 28 were found to be deriving no benefit from the treatment.

Surgery is the method of choice for treating soft tissue sarcomas. Often, however, doctors use chemotherapy in conjunction with surgery because they are more likely to spread.

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