It was just truly amazing to see it just erasing the tissue in front of my eyes. That's what it
looked like. Imagine a cancer treatment that can destroy tumors with nothing but sound.
Histotripsy is a non-invasive interventional
technology that uses ultrasound to break up the target disease tissue.
Pioneered by University of Michigan researchers and developed for clinical use by
Minneapolis-based company HistoSonics histotripsy is a promising alternative for cancer treatment.
After a 20-year journey histotripsy could soon be used to treat liver cancer patients
now that the Food and Drug Administration cleared the use of HistoSonic's histotripsy
delivery device in hospitals worldwide. This milestone is something that we've
been marching toward for years now and we're right at the cusp. Histotripsy as
a technique to treat cancer as a combined technique with systemic and immunotherapies
will hopefully change the future of cancer treatment. I'm really excited for that.
Because it is difficult to detect liver cancer is often diagnosed in later stages when surgery may
not be an option. That leaves chemotherapy and radiation treatments but these can cause severe
side effects that may take months to recover from or even cause long-term damage. Histotripsy offers
an option that homes in far more precisely on the tumor with minimal recovery for the patient.
Histotripsy actually uses microsecond ultrasound pulses to activate the nanometer gas pockets in
our body and then generate micro bubbles and make the micro bubbles expand in the
collapse within very short time frame and that creates very high mechanical strain and stress
to disrupt the disease cells such as the tumor cells. There really isn't much of a recovery
after you come out of general anesthesia many patients ask if the procedure was even done
because they don't feel any pain they can just get up and walk out when they're done.
To show its effectiveness histotripsy was used to treat patients with primary metastatic liver
tumors across Europe and the United States during the hope4liver clinical trials. The treatments
were administered using this robotic arm developed by HistoSonics called the Edison platform.
Much like a traditional ultrasound device it's positioned over the abdomen where clinicians
can then use the platform to lock onto the target tumor. We're now at the treatment
stage and everything's automated so the user will essentially enable the treatment and then
monitor in real time via the ultrasound feedback as the robot traverses our plan treatment volume.
After we discovered the histotripsy phenomenon we spend a lot of effort in the lab to actually
build specialized equipment instrumentation so that we can really use it in a clinical
setting. The University team in their diligence showed a great body of research
showing the capability of the therapy and it was up to us to make it into a product.
This is a treatment region right this is a dark color ablation zone outside
the spherical region there's no other dark color zone indicating there's nothing getting damaged.
With the success of human trials and now FDA approval hospitals will be able to purchase
the Edison platform offering histotripsy as a viable treatment alternative. As we
see cancer affecting younger and younger patients and often the younger patients
don't have surveillance so when they present they're already at advanced stage and hopefully
histrotripsy can make a difference in helping these patients. I'm just really excited to see
histotripsy use in a wider patient population. This will allow us to extend the history Gypsy
in the future for other applications such as renal tumor pancreatic tumor or even beyond
the cancer such as neurological applications and the cardiovascular applications. There's just so
many things that this type of technology in this system has the potential to bring to health care.
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