How does fusion technology help with targeted drug delivery?

Watch as Bradford Wood, MD, senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, describes the fascinating new technology that "maps" a patient's anatomy to precisely locate tumors, enabling doctors to deliver drugs that destroy it.

Transcript

00:00

It's almost like a drug paintbrush, where you're painting the drug locally where you see the tumor. And now we can see everything as it happens in real time.

00:07

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00:13

Where you have a tumor, we know where it is, and we've mapped it with this fusion technology. Now we're layering that data on top of a map.

00:22

We place a needle or a catheter to deliver the drug. In this case, let's talk about a catheter and a bead that eludes drug over time.

00:29

That bead we make imageable. So now we know where the tumor is, we know where the patient's normal anatomy is,

00:36

we know where the blood vessels are, which we use as a road map to get to the tumor. And we also know where the drug is. And soon to be released is a product

00:44

that we developed with industry, which is an imageable bead that eludes drug. So this bead, by being imageable,

00:51

reports its location with a simple X-ray or cone beam CT, which we do on the table while we're treating a patient,

00:57

in this case, liver cancer. So we now know where drug is, we know where the tumor is, we know where the normal anatomy is,

01:05

and we can figure out how to finish off that tumor by putting a needle into the place where the drug is not. So this is an area that we're actively working on,

01:13

but it shows you a combination of some of these technologies, where we're using software to navigate devices, needles, catheters, chemotherapy, local delivery of agents

01:23

that are imageable. So the drugs are imageable. It's almost like a drug paintbrush, where you're painting the drug locally where you see the tumor.

01:30

And we can deliver with software and with real time feedback while we're watching on a TV screen. Very exquisite delivery of energy in the case

01:37

where we're cooking tumors or chemotherapy or we're delivering beads that are imageable, that report their location.

01:44

And now we can see everything as it happens in real time and relate it back to the overall global information of what we need to do to that patient at that time

01:53

to get rid of that tumor. [AUDIO LOGO]