Early cancer treatment be lead to career award for Rafael Davalos

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In a recent article in the journal of Clinical Oncology, co-author Rafael Davalos using a method he invented described, to successfully handle a seven year old spayed female Labrador Retriever with a five year history of degenerative tasobedrennyj joint disease. The dog of the frequent lameness led to the discovery of a mass that was compatible with a cancerous tumor. With traditional treatment is survival for such patients three to six months.

Davalos of Virginia Tech - Wake Forest School of biomedical engineering and Sciences had five employees on the article: Robert E. Neal II and Paulo Garcia, also the bio-medical school, together with John H. Rossmeisl, Jr., Otto I. Lanz and Natalia Henao-Guerrero of the Virginia - Maryland Regional College of veterinary medicine, all at Virginia Tech.

They described how she followed by the well-known medical treatment of chemotherapy uses a combination of Davalos method patent-pending the irreversible Electroporation, shrink the tumor. Irreversible Electroporation after the tumor developed resistance to chemotherapy, use a second time to completely eradicate all signs of the cancer. After six months 14 reported the authors in the February 2011 journal article that the family according to clinical and brain tomography scans pet in complete remission.

It is now 12 months since the team first treated the patient, and remains of the dog in complete remission.

The National Science Foundation has named as one of the 2011 recipient of a career Davalos award continues to treat his ground-breaking research on the ability of the irreversible Electroporation, ill cells with and without adjuvant chemotherapy drugs or radiation. The career award is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious to the support of the junior faculty, illustrating the role of the teacher-scholar.

Davalos said that be novel procedure of each micro-seconds in length, for a specific electrical impulses, tissue area is. Goal is to open cell death Nanopores permanently in the membranes of the cell. The destruction of cells is in this case not due to injury by heat and therefore not the supporting structures in the tissue, including the extracellular matrix, blood vessels and nerve damage. "This performance is very important, because it allows the selective treatment of cells while maintaining healthy tissue architecture" added Davalos.

"This procedure is primarily targeted region, placed with two minimally invasive electrodes into the" Davalos said "Deploying approximately 80 ideas for the site in about a minute." "The impulses are high voltage but low energy, so no significant heating due to one of the procedures occurs."

His career prize of $450,000 Davalos will consider specifically whether irreversible Electroporation called glioblastoma Multiforme, the most common and aggressive type of primary brain tumors in humans can be adjusted procedures for the destruction of specific tumors. The median survival for people diagnosed these tumors is only 15 months. The team, which already handles also Tom Ellis at Wake Forest University and John Robertson at the vet school, has a canine patients with a brain tumor, which was on surgical resection. They used their procedures to kill, a majority of tumor volumes allows to handle the rest of the remaining cancer cells with radiation. Four months after the treatment there was no sign of the tumor.

"One of the reasons for the poor survive that glioma cells by acting infiltrate up to two inches of the volume of the visible tumor in the rule," said Davalos. Because the electric field from the electrode scattered, the process results in cells outside of the ablation zone to regions of the reversible Electroporated. These cells may then more susceptible for the inclusion of drugs.

"We beat irreversible Electroporation capacity for the treatment of infiltrative cells within this reversible zone in combination with chemotherapeutic agents evaluate." Treatment of malignant gliomas is limited by insufficient delivery of medicines due to the blood-brain barrier. "From this reason this plan will also examine whether IRE can be applied to give blood-brain barrier disruption in the delivery of chemotherapeutic agents., aid", Davalos said.

Davalos will use a combination of experiments and modeling of molecular biology, cellular and tissue levels. He believes that the medical community allows the broader impact of its work, to use this therapy in diseases such as cardiac arrhythmias.

Source:
Lynn A. Nystrom
Virginia Tech