Tag Archives: Brain tumor

Biomedical Engineers from Hyderabad ace at BioAsia Healthcare 2015

SharathChandra C, B H V Mani Kanta Swamy, G VijayaBhaskar B.Tech III year students of Biomedical Engineering, B. V. Raju Institute of Technology, Narsapur won First Prize in BioAsia 2015 Healthcare Devthon. The team was given Rs. 1 lakh grant for further development of the product and the team will be working with Technology Business Incubation Center, BITS Pilani (Hyderabad Campus).

BioAsia  2015 was an initiative to spur innovations in healthcare & life sciences through co-creation. Healthcare Devthon brought together healthcare experts, doctors, designers, engineers, technologists and developers together onto one platform to discover, design and rapidly prototype technologies and solutions relevant to the life sciences and healthcare fields. The goal is to facilitate the development of products and services that address unmet needs and are positioned to be rapidly adopted by end-users.

Indo-Canadian Collaboration for Medical Imaging R&D

Scientists from India and Canada are collaborating on the development of a new imaging technology focussed on brain tumours. The bilateral project—Improving the Detection, Diagnosis and Treatment of Brain Tumours—is valued at almost US$1.7 million and aims to develop and commercialise software that will provide radiologists with enhanced automated imaging methods to detect and characterise brain tumours and enable accelerated assessment and treatment.

Leveraging $486,000 from ISTP Canada and additional funding from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in India, the team is tasked with creating a new imaging technology that automatically locates, maps and monitors tumour changes and combines MRI and PET image data into a single information-rich diagnostic tool.

Nanoparticles making “inroads” into Brain Drug delievery

The majority of drugs do not penetrate from blood into the brain because of the hematoencephalic barrier existing between them. This creates a lot of difficulties for brain tumor treatment. Russian researchers have developed a system for drug delivery into the brain with the help of nanoparticles and demonstrated its efficiency on laboratory animals.

Glioblastoma is the most widespread and the most dangerous variety of the brain malignant tumor. At the moment, chemotherapy of such tumors has little effect due to existence of the hematoencephalic barrier – the filter that prevents alien agents (including drugs) from passing into the brain. Researchers worldwide are working to create medicinal systems, which could be used for glioblastoma therapy.

BRAIN CANCER STOPPED USING VENOM

BRAIN CANCER STOPPED BY SCORPION VENOM
Cutting the Spread of Tumors
Scientists have been looking at chlorotoxin, a peptide in scorpion venom, for the past decade as a way to target cancer cells. And the big payday has arrived. By combining nanoparticles with a scorpion venom mix already being investigated for treating brain cancer, University of Washington researchers found they could cut the spread of cancerous cells by 98 percent, compared to 45 percent for the scorpion venom alone (www.uwnews.org).
This is the first time that nanoparticles, which are ultrafine particles, have been combined with a treatment that physically stops cancer’s spread. “People talk about the treatment being more effective with nanoparticles but they don’t know how much, maybe 5 percent or 10 percent,” said Miqin Zhang, professor of materials science and engineering.  “This was quite a surprise to us.”  She is lead author of the study.
Chlorotoxin binds to a surface protein on many types of tumors, including brain cancer.  Chlorotoxin also disrupts the spread of tumors.
The Whole is Greater than the Parts
The researchers investigated chlorotoxin when it is attached to nanoparticles and found that the treatment’s effect doubles compared to chlorotoxin alone.  Adding nanoparticles often improves a therapy, partly because the combination lasts longer in the body and so has a better chance of reaching the tumor.  Combining also boosts the effect because therapeutic molecules clump around each nanoparticle.
Slowing the spread of cancer would be especially useful for treating highly invasive tumors, such as brain cancer.  The technique could hypothetically also slow the spread of other tumors with the same kind of activity, such as breast, colon, skin, lung, prostate, and ovarian cancers.