Combining Radiotherapeutics and MRIs to Cure Cancer

In a world where technology is advancing rapidly day by day, it can be hard to keep up with this. Not all technological advancements are mentioned into mainstream media, as there would genuinely be too many to report about, so when one is spotted in the news, you already get the feeling that it is quite ground-breaking.

Recently, at the Royal Marsden Hospital in South London, has the first patient been cured of cancer using a new technique which combines radiotherapy with MRI (magnetic resonance imaging).

Previously, to treat and cure cancer, methods such as surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, hormone therapy and radiation therapy have been deployed and they do indeed work 9 times out of 10 but IF it is a stage 0 cancer that is being dealt with  (i.e. it has not spread to neighbouring tissue and is currently contained within the cells membrane) all of which have their own negative side effects and or complications. For example some types of immunotherapy rev up your immune system and make you feel like you have the flu, complete with fever, chills, and fatigue. Others could cause problems like swelling, weight gain from extra fluids, heart palpitations.

The main problem with traditional cancer treatment methods is that many living/normal cells are harmed and or killed in the process, which again has negative implications on us such as severe fever.

As mentioned before, the part solution to this was to combine radiotherapy with an MRI scan. What this would mean is that the tumour can be imaged in real-time i.e. even the movements of it when the patient is breathing. Real-time imaging means a narrower dose can be given which means less damage to healthy tissue, it is essentially targeted therapy which you would have thought already exists but combining these two areas was a lengthy process involving hundreds of thousands of pounds going into the research. Only now has it successfully treated the first patient in the UK.

If we take lung cancer as an example (which is known as the deadliest cancer), a type of cancer which is known to use an extremely dangerous amount of radiation to cure the maximum numbers of cancer, but the lungs are in close proximity to other healthy structures in the chest which obviously limits the amount of dose that you can admission which therefore affects the treatment. So with this new technology, the dose administered can be targeted to where it is needed rather than cause harm, subsequently perhaps stronger more concentrated doses can be used, as due to the real time imaging it should not affect healthy tissue nearby.

In my opinion, I think that this is truly a breakthrough in medical technology and not only can it be used for all types of image able cancer, but will put a halt on the 792,000 death toll in the US to Lung and bronchial cancer.

With cancer being in the top 5 list of causes for premature death, it is inevitable that a large amount of time, resources and money are going into this sector to research new treatment methods to find a hard and fast “cure” per se. But I feel as if the development of cancer treatment is proportional to the advancements in technology, due to how interlinked they are/ have become.