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Using a non-invasive method of combining Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) scanning, doctors can determine, after a single cycle of chemotherapy, whether the toxic drugs are killing the cancer or not.

Forum Topics
How do you think this non invasive method, to determine cancer treatment effectiveness, will affect a patient’s quality of life?
How will future studies gauge responses to novel and targeted therapies using this method?

A study, which appears in the April 15th issue of the Clinical Cancer Research journal, found that effectiveness, after the first dose of chemotherapy drugs, could be determined after only a week, compared to a typical 3 month bout with treatment.

“There’s no point in giving a patient a treatment that isn’t working. These treatments make patients very sick and have long-term serious side effects,” commented Dr. Fritz Eiber, assistant professor of surgical oncology, director of the Sarcoma Program, UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center, senior author of the study, in a UCLA news article.

Cancer cells consume much more sugar than normal cancer cells do because of the ‘out of control’ rate in which cancer cells grow. Using a glucose uptake probe called FDG, PET images illuminate the cancer cells and can see real time biochemical functions.

The speedy determination is significant as it means an improvement in guiding patient care, and “will have an even greater impact on patients with inoperable tumors or metastatic disease as you get a much quicker evaluation of treatment effectiveness and can make decisions that will hugely impact quality of life,” concluded Eiber.

Source
http://www.cancer.ucla.edu/