Neolys Diagnostics has developed a blood test to measure patients’ sensitivity to radiation before they receive radiation therapy, a common prostate cancer treatment.
The test helps doctors choose a radiation level that a patient’s healthy tissue can withstand — so as little damage as possible is done to that tissue. Doctors have had few ways of judging that amount.
More than half of prostate cancer patients receive radiotherapy, Neolys said. Although it is effective, a lot of patients experience unwanted side effects and severe damage to normal tissue.
Bearing in mind that patients react differently to side effects and that their normal tissue can withstand different levels of radiation, Neolys identified biomarkers to measure healthy-tissue sensitivity to the treatment.
It said its blood test can determine a patient’s risk of experiencing certain side effects within a couple of hours.
“We are very proud of the performances of this new precise and rapid test,” Julien Gillet-Daubin, chief executive officer of Neolys Diagnostics, said in a press release. “It is a significant breakthrough for patients and their physicians. A single drop of blood will be enough. This product opens a new paradigm in the practice of precision medicine in radiotherapy.”
In related news, IsoRay announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has reviewed its application for marketing GammaTile, the company’s radiation therapy system for prostate cancer. The agency asked for additional information before approving its sales, IsoRay said.
The FDA asks medical device manufacturers to alert it to their plans to market a device at least 90 days in advance. The agency does this partly to determine whether the device is new, or equivalent to one already on the market, so it can properly classify it.
GammaTile uses an approach called brachytherapy to deliver elevated doses of radiation to targeted tissue before surgery without damaging surrounding areas. The doses are in the form of proprietary Cesium-131 radiation seeds.
You can read more about brachytherapy and GammaTile’s advantages and disadvantages here.
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