Glowing dye used to help find invisible cells

A special type of fluorescent dye could help surgeons to more precisely locate and remove prostate cancer cells, British scientists at the University of Oxford believe.

It is important to remove all the cancer to reduce the risk of it coming back.

The glowing dye attaches to proteins that are only present in cancer cells.

In a small initial study of 23 men, the surgeons say the technique helped them find areas of cancerous tissue that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye or by other clinical techniques.

A larger trial, funded by Cancer Research UK (CRUK), is currently being planned.

In some of the 23 men undergoing surgery for prostate cancer, surgeons found cancer cells that had spread to nearby tissue or lymph nodes but may have been missed using conventional methods.

This is the first time the method has been tested on humans in the UK, and the results are European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.

Larger trials are Facilitate learningwill further test how effective this is compared to other approaches.

Lead researcher Prof Freddy Hamdi told the BBC it was too early to know whether the treatment would work for all patients, but it looked “promising”.

“In many patients, it has uncovered cancer that would not have been found otherwise,” he said.

“This is the first time we’ve been able to see such fine details of prostate cancer in real time during surgery,” Prof Hamdy said.

“With this technique, we can remove all of the cancer, including cells that may have spread from the tumor and recur later.”

“Invisible cancers are just as important,” he added.

Prof Hamdy believes that this method will enable more healthy tissue to be preserved during surgery, reducing the chance of side effects that sometimes occur after prostate surgery, such as erectile dysfunction and incontinence.

David Butler, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, took part in the trial.

“We found out I had cancer in my lymph nodes and bladder,” he said.

He underwent radiation treatment after surgery and has since been cancer-free.

“I feel very lucky,” he said.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men in the UK, with around 52,300 new cases of prostate cancer each year.

Dr Ian Foulkes, executive director of research and innovation at CRUK, said: “We need better tools to find cancer when it has started to spread further. The combination of marker dye and imaging system developed in this study could fundamentally change the way prostate cancer is treated in future.”

CRUK hopes that if trials are successful, the dye could potentially be used in surgery to treat other types of cancer in future.