Interventional
Interventional…….tekst volgt
Brain
Brain tumors are one of the emerging problems in human and veterinary medicine. In general, the prognosis is guarded, and the average life expectancy is short. For both, veterinary and human patients the current treatment options involve surgery and radiation therapy, which rarely result in curation and are often accompanied by significant side-effects.
Our novel treatment option for brain tumors involves neuro-navigated needle-injections of radioactive holmium microspheres into the tumor using image-guidance (MRI and CT), which ensures accurate administration of the microspheres into the tumor. With this minimally invasive treatment approach, the applied radiation dose in the tumor can be higher than conventional radiation therapy without damaging the surrounding or healthy tissue, thereby minimizing the potential side-effects.
The research project is being conducted by a consortium of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Delft University of Technology, the Neurosurgery department at the UMC Utrecht and two companies: Quirem Medical, and Elekta.
Squama cell carcinoma
Squamous cell carcinomas are the most common malignant tumors in the oral cavity of cats. The medium survival time for most of the available treatment options is only 3 months and this highlights the need for alternatives. The accessibility of the tumour and the fact that these tumors do not often metastasize, make feline squama cell carcinoma an ideal candidate for nanobody-targeted photodynamic therapy (NB-PDT). This clinically approved therapy makes use of locally applied light to activate a photosensitizer which is specifically directed to cancer cells by its conjugation to a NB-targeting a tumour marker, endothelial growth factor receptor (EGFR) in our case.
Feline squama cell carcinoma resembles many features with its human counterparts, both clinically and biologically and therefore, translation to selected human patients may be considered in the future.
This research project is a collaborative project with the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Department of Biology (Molecular Targeted Therapies Group), from the Faculty of Science of Utrecht University.