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By RYAN JASLOW CBS NEWS February 18, 2014, 3:09 PM

Illustration of a glioblastoma brain tumor (highlighted in orange).

Tough-to-treat glioblastoma brain tumors may have met their match in a

promising new treatment that hijacks what makes the deadly cancers spread so
easily, turning that mechanism against the cancer itself.
The new treatment approach keeps cancer drugs out of the brain by directing
tumor cells along an artificial track that leads them to tumor drugs, sparing
healthy brain tissue thats often damaged by treatment.
"One attraction about the approach is that it is purely a device," lead research
investigator Ravi Bellamkonda, chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of
Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, said in
astatement. Treating these cancers with minimally-invasive films could be a lot
less dangerous than deploying pharmaceutical chemicals."
Glioblastoma is one of the most common forms of brain cancer, affecting about
10,000 patients each year -- about half of whom will die within 15 months of
diagnosis.
Tumors that arise in the brain without a known origin are called gliomas, and the
most malignant forms are glioblastomas. They are aggressive, infiltrative and
cannot be cured by surgery, according to the University of Texas MD Anderson
Cancer Center.

The researchers pointed out that more tumor that can be removed, the better the
prognosis. But, the tumor spreads throughout the brain on nerve fibers and blood
vessels, allowing it to invade new areas that surgeons are typically reluctant to
operate on. Even if the main tumor can be removed, its often spread throughout
the brain by the time a person is diagnosed.
Thats where the new technique -- developed by scientists at the Georgia Institute
of Technology in Atlanta -- comes in. The team designed an alternative fiber out
of a polymer called polycaprolactone (PCL) surrounded by flexible polyurethane
that mimics the surfaces of nerves and blood vessels that glioblastoma cells
would typically follow.
The fibers are about half the diameter of human hair. Instead of guiding the
cancers to different areas of the brain, the track takes the cells to a "tumor
collector" gel located outside of the brain containing a drug called cyclopamine,
which is toxic to cancer.
The scientists tested this novel approach in rats, comparing the effects with
implanted fibers made of a different polymer, or a PCL fiber without the contours
mimicking nerves and blood vessels.
After 18 days, they found rats treated with the new technique had tumor sizes
reduced by up to 90 percent compared to the other rats, with cancer cells seen
moving the entire length of the fibers into the tumor collector gel.
Cancer cells normally latch onto these natural structures and ride them like a
monorail to other parts of the brain, said Bellamkonda. By providing an
attractive alternative fiber, we can efficiently move the tumors along a different
path to a destination that we choose.
The treatment is far from ready for human use. The Food and Drug
Administration requires extensive testing that can take up to a decade, with rat
research among the earliest steps. The scientists are hopeful that if successful, the
approach may one day be used to treat other diseases as well.
"If we can provide cancer an escape valve of these fibers, that may provide a way
of maintaining slow-growing tumors such that, while they may be inoperable,
people could live with the cancers because they are not growing," he said.
"Perhaps with ideas like this, we may be able to live with cancer just as we live
with diabetes or high blood pressure."
The new research was published Feb. 16 in Nature Materials, with research
supported by the National Cancer Institute.
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