{"id":454,"date":"2014-10-28T10:45:44","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T15:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/?p=454"},"modified":"2021-12-10T17:11:50","modified_gmt":"2021-12-10T22:11:50","slug":"skala","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/2014\/10\/skala\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving breast cancer chemo by testing tumors in a dish"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the tragic realities of cancer is that the drugs used to treat  it are highly toxic and their effectiveness varies unpredictably from  patient to patient. However, a new \u201ctumor-in-a-dish\u201d technology is  poised to change this reality by rapidly assessing how effective  specific anti-cancer cocktails will be on an individual\u2019s cancer before  chemotherapy begins.<\/p>\n<p>A team of biomedical engineers at Vanderbilt University headed by Assistant Professor <a href=\"http:\/\/engineering.vanderbilt.edu\/bme\/facultystaff\/melissa-skala.php\">Melissa Skala<\/a> has developed the technique, which uses fluorescence imaging to monitor  the response of three-dimensional chunks of tumors removed from  patients and exposed to different anti-cancer drugs.<\/p>\n<p>In an <a href=\"http:\/\/cancerres.aacrjournals.org\/content\/74\/18\/5184.abstract?sid=fb025c59-a9c7-4ee2-8a33-c07b784b6bc9\">article<\/a> published last month by the journal <a href=\"http:\/\/cancerres.aacrjournals.org\/\"><em>Cancer Research<\/em><\/a> the engineers describe applying the technique to the three major forms  of breast cancer. They report that the test can detect significant drops  in the metabolic activity levels of all three types of tumors within 72  hours when exposed to an effective drug whereas tumors that were  resistant to a drug show no change.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.vanderbilt.edu\/2014\/10\/breast-cancer-chemo-dish\/\">KEEP READING&gt;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the tragic realities of cancer is that the drugs used to treat it are highly toxic and their effectiveness varies unpredictably from patient to patient. However, a new \u201ctumor-in-a-dish\u201d technology is poised to change this reality by rapidly assessing how effective specific anti-cancer cocktails will be on an individual\u2019s cancer before chemotherapy begins&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3411,"featured_media":455,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[220,12],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-melissa-skala","tag-vinse-faculty-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3411"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":645,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions\/645"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/vinsenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}