Tracking Tumours

Tracking animals through a forest, the footprints and droppings they leave behind reveal their size, health and habits. And for doctors hunting tumours in the body, the molecules and materials they produce provide important clues. For example, assessing gliomas – deadly brain tumours – is tricky, so a new approach is using magnetic resonance spectroscopy to visualise their metabolic, rather than structural, properties. By revealing the presence of a substance often produced by tumours, the scans can monitor its activity and response to treatments. For example, after just one week of an experimental treatment, the amount of 2HG – a molecule known to initiate and boost tumour growth, orange in these brain scans – produced by a patient’s glioma was dramatically reduced (right). Similar scans also showed reductions in other tumour outputs, suggesting the treatment is reprogramming its activity, and highlighting the value of this new tracking tool in the tumour hunter’s arsenal.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Ovidiu Andronesi, M.D., Ph.D., Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital
• Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature Communications, April 2018