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They then grew human breast tumors in mice and treated some of these with trastuzumab. When they imaged tumors in live mice, OMI showed a difference in response between trastuzumab-sensitive and -resistant tumors as early as two days after the first dose of the antibody. In comparison, FDG-PET imaging, the standard clinical metabolic imaging technique, could not measure any difference in response between trastuzumab-sensitive and -resistant tumors at any time point in the experiment, which lasted 12 days.
"Cancer drugs have profound effects on cellular energy production, and this can be harnessed by OMI to identify responding cells from nonresponding cells," said Walsh. "We are hoping to develop a high-throughput screening method to predict the optimal drug treatment for a particular patient."
Importantly, OMI can be used on tissues freshly excised from patients but, with further development, it could be incorporated in endoscopes for live imaging of human cancers, according to the investigators.
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I've read this with great interest, especially with the discussions the board has had about metabolomics vs. genomics.
Still, they state they are looking at live cells under a microscope and had to harvest the cells somehow. I think the procedure to harvest live cells currently would be a biopsy or surgery. Using an endoscope with a breast tumor – I’m not following the non invasive part. Perhaps for Her2 + gastric cancer scoping would be a wonderful option to determine effectiveness?
The impressive part is that they can tell if the cancer is responding to treatment:
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When they placed normal and cancerous breast cells under the microscope, OMI generated distinct signals for the two types of cells. OMI could also differentiate between estrogen receptor-positive, estrogen receptor-negative, HER2-positive, and HER2-negative breast cancer cells. Next, the researchers tested the effect of the anti-HER2 antibody trastuzumab on three breast cancer cell lines that respond differently to the antibody. They found that the redox ratios were significantly reduced in drug-sensitive cells after trastuzumab treatment but unaffected in the resistant cells.
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If taking a biopsy or tumor sample it seems more logical to me just to send it up to Rational Therapeutics and have them determine cell death end points before exposing a patient to a treatment that their cancer cells are resistant to.