Starving the Tumor

Technical progress in areas apparently unrelated to medicine can sometimes lead to spectacular medical progress. Dr. Robert Rand, a neurosurgeon at the University of California at Los Angeles, has demonstrated a particular knack for encouraging just that sort of scientific serendipity. A decade ago he borrowed from the emerging technology of cryogenics (application of temperatures close to absolute zero*) and helped to adapt an extremely cold probe to destroy hard-to-reach pituitary tissue in brain operations. Now Rand is making use of another recently utilized phenomenon: superconductivity. With the help of a powerful "superconductive" magnet, he is accomplishing knifeless, bloodless destruction of tumors.

Rand had previously employed magnetism in the operating room. In 1966, he injected microscopic iron spheres into blood vessels of patients who had suffered aneurysms, or "blowouts" in blood vessels in the brain. He used the magnet to hold the filings in place at the site of the rupture until new tissue grew over them to close the hole.

Rand's plan for destroying tumors required an even more powerful magnetic field. To get it, he used an electromagnet cooled by liquid helium to near absolute zero. That produced superconductivity: the virtual disappearance of electrical resistance in the magnet. This allowed a greatly increased flow of current and boosted the strength of the magnet to 3 1/2 times that of the best alternate magnet available.

Iron Pellets. Rand then capitalized on the fact that tumors cut off from their blood supply die because they are unable to obtain nourishment or pass off wastes. To starve a tumor in one of his patients, Rand injected liquid silicone containing microscopic iron spheres into a blood vessel near the tumor. He waited until the material was carried through capillaries and into the tumor itself, then switched on his strategically placed magnet, which attracted the iron pellets and fixed them in the tumor. The spheres confined the viscous, quick-setting silicone, preventing it from entering the main bloodstream, where it could cause obstructions. The solidified silicone will remain in the patient for the rest of his life. But the tumor, its blood vessels blocked, has already begun to wither and die.

Rand, who has used his new technique on only five patients so far, stresses that it is applicable only to tumors fed by a capillary system that is easy to isolate. Given that qualification, the procedure seems to be effective. A 70-year-old woman, unwilling to submit to conventional surgery for a brain tumor, underwent magnetic surgery in March. Rand cannot find the tumor with X rays any longer, and although he will not say that the growth has disappeared, there is good reason to believe that it has at least shrunk. The patient's eye, which had been forced part way out of its socket by the expanding tumor, has returned to its proper place.

* Absolute zero, the theoretical temperature at which molecular motion in all gases ceases, is -459.67DEG F.

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