Poisoning the Well

An invading army surrounds a city’s walls and… waits. Cutting off or poisoning a city’s water supply was a cruel way to speed up surrender. Scientists are using similar tactics to fight cancer. The left panel shows the blood vessels of a kidney with cancer – the patient’s tumour is the pale egg shape on the left side of the organ. The best treatment is surgery to remove the tumour, but this isn’t always possible. Researchers have developed another option for these cases. In the right panel, doctors have targeted the arteries feeding the tumour with a catheter. They inject tiny beads into these blood vessels which block the blood supply to the tumour and release anti-cancer drugs. Six months after treatment, over eight in ten tumours had either shrunk or stayed the same size. None of the patients had serious side effects. This treatment could soon be available as standard for patients with inoperable kidney cancer.

Written by Henry Stennett

Henry Stennett

Writer

Henry is a science communicator at Cancer Research UK and a freelance writer. He used to research microbiology but now he’s got the writing bug.

• Image from work by Yonghua Bi and Xiaonan Shi, and colleagues
• Department of Interventional Radiology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Scientific Reports, May 2022