SINGAPORE researchers have developed a magic bullet that could save liver cancer patients who now face almost certain death in a year.
Trials on mice and pigs have been extremely successful, said Dr Pierce Chow, director of experimental surgery at Singapore General Hospital. He is ready to try it on people and is looking for eight to 10 patients for whom surgery is not possible.
Liver cancer is one of the most difficult to treat because the drugs and radiation needed to kill the cancer will very likely destroy the liver as well.
However, preliminary research at SGH has found a way to deliver radioactive isotopes for treating the cancer to where the killer disease is.
It is done by way of a biodegradable silicon produced by British company pSiMedica, which is partly owned by Britain's Defence Ministry.
Using miniscule silicon chips, the treatment can be controlled so rigorously that only the cancerous cells and some good cells around the tumour are killed, leaving the rest of the liver intact.
The chips are hard enough to carry the radioactive isotopes yet able to degrade within a few weeks.
They can be controlled to release, over six weeks, just the dose of radiation needed.
The chips, ground into coarse powder, are inserted into the centre of the tumour in a simple procedure done with the patient awake throughout. Depending on the size and shape of the tumour, several chips can be inserted, with each chip killing cells within an 8mm radius.
There are between 300 and 400 new cases of liver cancer here each year. In most cases, the patient is either too sick to be operated on, the liver is too damaged or the cancer has spread throughout the organ.
Even with treatment, patients live, on average, for only another three months after diagnosis.
During animal tests at SGH, the radiation was confined to the site of the chip.
If the human trial is successful, a larger multi-nation trial will follow.
If it proves effective in people, the cancer-killing chips should be on the market within three years, Dr Chow said.
The reason approval can be given so quickly is that the drug used is not new, only the way it is delivered to the cancer cells.
Targeting treatment directly at a cancer tumour is not new. Prostate cancer can be treated this way with the use of gold pellets the size of a rice grain.
But gold does not dissolve, so it is not used for other cancers for fear that it will migrate to other parts of the body and cause harm.
There are biodegradable medical materials, such as sutures, but none are hard enough to carry radioactive isotopes.
The silicon chips designed with nanotechnology are strong, degradable and safe when dissolved in the body.
Dr Chow said the use of the chips could be expanded later to treat all solid cancers, such as breast, pancreatic, ovarian, cervical and lung.