Doctors in the US are using Irish technology to measure radiation doses, writes Claire O'Connell
Cancer patients in the United States are to benefit from technology that scientists in Cork originally developed to monitor radiation exposure in space satellites.
US medical devices company Sicel Technologies Inc has just put on the market the first implantable radiation sensor device that can tell doctors how much radiation hits tumour tissue during a patient's radiotherapy treatment.
The Dose Verification System (DVS) device is used to monitor radiation treatment of tumours in patients with breast or prostate cancer, and can tell physicians the actual dose of radiation that hit the mark, explains Sicel's president and chief executive, Michael Riddle.
"This will tell for the very first time did they actually deliver to the tumour the precise amount of radiation they were targeting.
"If you get adequate radiation, you get good tumour control and if you underdose, you run the risk of a re-occurrence," he says.
A patient normally has two of the tiny devices implanted, one in the tumour and one in normal tissue, he says.
Following radiation treatment, medical personnel can then use a hand-held reader device held close to the patient's body "like a bar-code scanner" to pick up information from the implanted sensor about how much radiation was delivered to the site. "The device sits there, it doesn't have any internal battery power, and it sends the information back out to the reader about the actual radiation that was received at the tumour," says Riddle.
The radiation sensor technology in the DVS device was originally developed at Tyndall National Institute in Cork for the European Space Agency to monitor how much radiation satellites are exposed to in space.
The lateral move into medical application is an example of innovation in action, according to Tyndall's director of industry and innovation, Michael Grufferty.
Tyndall has been working with Sicel for several years, developing and customising radiation sensor technology for use in cancer applications, Grufferty says.
The DVS device has just been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be put on the US market for use in breast and prostate cancer treatment, and already the first patients have had the device implanted, according to Sicel's Riddle.
The company is now looking into using the DVS for lung and rectal cancers too, he says, and it would eventually like to market the device outside the US.
"Once we get through about six to nine months of US history, we will start to look at bringing it to Europe," Riddle says.