An emerging cancer treatment becomes much more widely usable

What's the news: Targeted radiation therapy is now possible for a much greater variety of cancers.

Why should we believe it: This news is based on a recent study published by scientists at the University of Cincinnati.

First, a bit of background: Targeted radiation therapy (TRT) is an emerging form of cancer therapy that delivers a radioactive payload to individual cells. This avoids the bodywide damage caused by regular, outside-in radiation therapy. It’s also much more effective against metastases.

TRT works thanks to specific binding sites on tumor cells that don't exist in normal, healthy cells. However, those unique binding sites are both an opportunity and a problem. Many cancers don't produce those unique binding sites, which has made it impossible to treat those cancers using TRT — until now.

The very clever upgrade: Specific bacteria grow inside solid tumors because of the low-oxygen environment. The scientists in the present study used receptors on those bacteria as "tractor beams" to attract TRT payloads.

The result? Cancerous mice who got this new bacteria-targeting radiation treatment lived significantly longer than control mice. Scientists also found increased anti-tumor cells in the treated mice.

Why this is a big deal: As the lead investigator on this study, Nalinikanth Kotagiri, put it, “You can put these bacteria as adapters inside whichever tumor it is; it doesn’t seem to matter. As long as they’re solid and have a hypoxic core, the bacteria will thrive there and serve as artificial receptors for these targeted radionuclides.”

So what's next: This new technology could make TRT a viable, effective, low-side-effect treatment for a much greater variety of cancers. Of course, this is only an animal study, and human studies will have to follow before we can be sure of both safety and efficacy.

But the undeniable conclusion is how much clever, novel, and powerful medical research is going on right now. I personally finds it inspiring. It gives me hope that even intractable diseases, which we have been unsuccessfully fighting for millennia, might soon be treatable with just an injection — a radioactive injection maybe, but still, just an injection.