Scientific Breakthroughs: From Gene Therapy to Creative New Approaches to Cancer Surgery, Patients Stand to Benefit Dramatically, But How Will We Pay For This Innovation?

Innovation Series, Part 3: The Cancer “Pen”

From gene therapy to a “pen” that can detect cancerous tissue in 10 seconds, we live in a time of amazing scientific breakthroughs. Advances in technology and our understanding of the genetic basis of disease are resulting in a range of innovations that hold the promise of improving our approaches to treatment – including things like new treatment options for rare diseases and improving the likelihood of success of something like cancer surgery.

Scientists at the University of Texas report that they have developed a handheld device that can identify cancerous tissue in 10 seconds; the goal is to make surgery to remove a tumor quicker, safer, and more precise, according to a recent article in BBC News.

They hope the test will help “avoid the ‘heartbreak’ of leaving any of the cancer behind.” The study, conducted by Jialing Zhang, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, et al., is published in the September issue of Science Translational Medicine. The authors report that the test is 96% accurate.

To use the pen, a surgeon would place it on suspected cancer tissue, where it “releases a tiny droplet of water,” the BBC article notes. “Chemicals inside the living cells move into the droplet, which is then sucked back up the pen for analysis.” The pen is then plugged into a mass spectrometer and produces a “chemical fingerprint that tells doctors whether they are looking at healthy tissue or cancer.”

“The challenge for surgeons is finding the border between the cancer and normal tissue,” the article notes.  For some tumors, this border “is obvious, but in others the boundary between healthy and diseased tissue can be blurred.” The pen may help doctors “ensure none of the cancer is left behind.”

Other examples of innovation abound; for instance, scientists at Imperial College London have developed an “intelligent knife” that “smells” the tissue it cuts to determine whether it is removing cancer, according to the BBC. And teams at Harvard and the University of Michigan are using lasers to analyze how much of a brain cancer to remove; this could be helpful to surgeons, given that “brain cancer is like a cloud, you can define the center, but the edges are really hard to discern,” as one of the researchers, Daniel Orringer, University of Michigan, notes.

What do all of these new and potentially lifesaving innovations mean for the health care system? As with any innovation that offers new hope for patients, there will likely be high demand, but that will have to be considered in the context of limited resources. We are witnessing significant new innovations and scientific advancement; the usual questions of access and how to pay for it will be dramatically amplified in this modern era, given the unprecedented price tags.