Imaging helps show cancer aggression
Medical scans are good at finding cancerous tumours, but not so successful at predicting how they will grow or spread. A new approach being developed could change this, allowing doctors to tailor cancer treatments for each patient more accurately and effectively.
Ken Miles, Professor of Imaging at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, is exploring the idea that measuring the amount of glucose that the tumour is drawing from the patient's blood, as well as the overall blood flow to the tumour, will give an idea of how it will grow and form new tumours elsewhere in the body.
Medical scans include mammography, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), computer tomography (CT) and other techniques that allow us to visualise the inside of the body without surgery. These are vital for the treatment of cancer, in identifying the tumour, recording its size and in measuring how it responds to the various anti-cancer drugs that doctors can prescribe.
A tumour needs to draw upon the patient’s blood supply for nutrients, including glucose, in order to grow and form tumours elsewhere, a process called metastasing. Some new anticancer drugs aim to cut down the supply of blood and the nutrients it contains.
Until now, doctors scanning patients to see how effective their drugs have been have looked at the size of the tumour. However, new scanning techniques can also show whether treatment has reduced the amount of blood flowing to the tumour and the amount of glucose the tumour is using. They had often assumed that cutting the amount of blood to the tumour would also automatically cut the amount of glucose going to it as well, so there was no need to measure both separately.
But Professor Miles is working on the idea that some tumours, described as aggressive, will continue to draw enough glucose from the patient's blood even if the blood supply to them is low. They can do this because some cancers respond to low blood flow by increasing the efficiency by which it metabolises glucose, so that there is still enough energy for it to grow and metastasize.
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