Probe For Cancer Surgery

A recent article was published with information about an infallible hand-held probe that is to aid cancer surgery.  Researchers in Canada have invented an intraoperative probe that reliably detects multiple types of tumor cells.  For longer life expectancy and reduced risk of recurrence for patients with common widespread forms of cancer they can now thank this multimodal optical spectroscopy probe recently developed.

Scientists at Polytechnique Montreal, the Centre de recherché du Centre hospitalier de I’Universite de Montreal, the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University and the MUHC scientists developed a hand-held Raman spectroscopy probe in 2015 that allows surgeons to accurately detect virtually all brain cancer cells in real time during surgery.

The invention has now been perfected and they have designed a new device with improved accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, capable of finding not only the brain cancer cells but colon, lung and skin cancer cells as well.  There was a nearly 100% sensitivity in the intraoperative testing with the optical spectroscopy probe in detection of these cells.  When pointed at a cancerous region, the probe is never wrong.

The American Association for Cancer Research journal Cancer Research has published the details.  These are through the collaborative efforts of engineer Frederic Leblond and neurosurgical oncology specialist Dr. Kevin Petrecca.

Being able to eliminate the number of cancer cells during brain surgery completely is a critical part of cancer treatment, but detecting cancer cells during surgery is challenging.  Often they find it impossible to distinguish cancer from normal brain, so the invasive brain cancer cells often remain after surgery, leading to a recurrence of the cancer and a worse prognosis.

This probe enables detection of nearly 100% of cancer cells in the brain, thus having more patients that will benefit from better diagnosis, more effective treatment and lower risk of recurrence.  Surgeons can use it during a procedure to detect cancer cells in real time that is difficult to make by a naked-eye observation.

The intraoperative probe uses the same Raman spectroscopy technology as the researchers’ first-generation probe to interpret the chemical composition of the tissue examined.  It was originally tested in 2015 on more than 80 patients during surgery and has now been perfected by the inventors.  The new version is multimodal and uses intrinsic fluorescence spectroscopy to interpret the metabolic composition of the cells.

There are randomized controlled clinical trials under way involving patients with gliomas, and will be the first study in the world to demonstrate the clinical benefits of intraoperative probe use during brain surgery.  Petrecca and Leblond created a company in 2015, ODS Medical, to commercialize the probe and have initiated the formal approval process with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure transfer of the technology to hospital settings within the next few years.

Dr Fredda Branyon