Bubbles to Kill Cancer ( with a few cruel asides)

University of Michigan Medical School Radiology researchers, are looking into using gas bubbles to embolize small arteries leading to cancerous tumours.

The process of blocking blood flow to a tumor is called embolization, and using gas bubbles is a new technique in embolotherapy. What makes it so promising is that the technique allows doctors to control exactly where the bubbles are formed, so blockage of blood flow to surrounding tissue is minimal, said Joseph Bull, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at U-M.

The research of Bull and collaborator Brian Fowlkes, an associate professor in the Department of Radiology in the U-M Medical School, is currently focused on the fundamental vaporization and transport topics that must first be understood in order to translate this developmental technique to the clinic.

In traditional embolotherapy techniques, the so-called cork that doctors use to block the blood flow—called an emboli—is solid. For instance, it could be a blood clot or a gel of some kind. A major difficulty with these approaches is restricting the emboli to the tumor to minimize destruction of surrounding tissue, without extremely invasive procedures, Bull said. The emboli must be delivered by a catheter placed into the body at the tumor site.

Gas bubbles, on the other hand, allow very precise delivery because their formation can be controlled and directed from the outside, by a focused high intensity ultrasound.

This envisioned technique is actually a two-step process, Bull said. First, a stream of encapsulated superheated perfluorocarbon liquid droplets goes into the body by way of an intravenous injection. The droplets are small enough that they don’t lodge in vessels. Doctors image the droplets with standard ultrasound, and once the droplets reach their destination, scientists hit them with high intensity ultrasound. The ultrasound acts like a pin popping a water balloon. After the shell pops, the perfluorocarbon expands into a gas bubble that is approximately 125 times larger in volume than the droplet

More at the Source. Hat tip Medgadget.

This is a potentially good approach to embolizing arteries. We all know the damage that air emboli do to unwary SCUBA divers who hold their breaths on ascent, or what nitrogen bubbles in the blood do to sufferers of the Bends, when they fail to de-compress adequately. Whether to treat cancer, or to stop aneurysms from bleeding, safe methods of arterial occlusion/embolization have to be developed.

Now for the cruel asides. While looking over the U Mich. news service webpage, I noticed some headlines on the sidebar. The first headline was "Why Money Doesn't Bring Happiness." The second headline read, "Study Reveals a Disproportionately High Number of Minorities and Poor Live near Toxic Waste Facilities".

Now, anyone with an IQ over 90 can read those two headlines and see an inconsistency. So why did the media people at UMich fail to see something that so clearly made them look silly? You can reach your own conclusions.

As for the second headline: " a disproportionately high number of minorities and poor live near toxic waste facilities". Likewise, anyone with an intelligence high enough to get a job begging on the streetcorner can see that using the phrase "minorities and poor" in that sentence is bad technique (although quite PC).

It is obvious to almost everyone able to ambulate to the corner store, that if a minority is wealthy enough, he will choose to live away from a toxic waste facility. Being a minority has nothing to do with it--it is being poor that forces someone to live where he does not want to live, at least in Canada, the US, and the rest of the Anglosphere. So that although money may not bring happiness, it can certainly help you to do away with several obvious causes of unhappiness.

You cannot expect a journalist to understand the concept of epidemiological confounding, or even simple contradiction, but an IQ above 80 and common sense, should lead journalists to think about what they write, far more often than they seem to.

If it was "all about the story", you would think that journalists would try harder to get the story right. But it is really about being a member of the club, and hoping if you say the right things, the club will give you a Pulitzer, or a lucrative job with a high paying publisher. Think about the fact that it is the low achieving students who become journalists (and schoolteachers), and contemplate what that means for the quality of information that filters down to the public and the schools.