Dialing up chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer with ultrasound

By enhancing the ability of cells to absorb chemotherapeutics, researchers have nearly doubled the median patient survival time from diagnosis in a phase I clinical trial. Researchers have combined a laboratory ultrasound technique called ‘sonoporation’ with the commercially-available chemotherapy compound Gemcitabine to increase the porosity of pancreatic cells with microbubbles and to help get the drug into cancer cells where it is needed.