New Awesome Light Therapy!

Sometimes when people have cancer, they need to have therapy. New and developing types of therapy include PDT and PIT.

Imagine you have a garden with some unwanted weeds. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is like a two-step process to get rid of those weeds.

First, we sprinkle a special powder on the weeds. This powder is like a sleepy gardener - it doesn't hurt the weeds by itself. Then, we shine a special light on the garden. When the light hits the powder, it wakes up the gardener and he pulls out all the weeds! This gardener only attacks the weeds it's touching, not the healthy flowers nearby.

This is kind of like what PDT does to fight cancer cells. Doctors give medicine to the body, which specifically accumulates within cancer cells. Then, they shine a special light to activate the medicine, which destroys the cancer cells by producing bomb like oxygen species (known as reactive oxygen species) causing cancer cell death.

But there's a problem: the powder can sometimes accumulate within non-weed cells, thereby causing undesired phototoxic effects. Moreover, when weeds hide within light inaccessible underground environment, the potency of PDT modality will clearly be compromised. Efforts to bypass these unwanted effects led to the development of a new therapy called photo-immunotherapy (PIT).

PIT is like having a special gardener! We give the sleepy gardener gardening gloves acting as a vehicle which specifically recognizes cancer weed cells and selectively delivers the powder within them. Then, we shine the light. Just like before, the light wakes up the gardener, but this time, he only attacks the cancer cells his gloves stick to. This way, we can minimize the powder phototoxic effects on non-targeted weeds. Essentially, the gardening sticking gloves containing powder are nontoxic in their native administered form, with phototoxic effects unleashed only at the targeted weeds. Of note, PIT is preferentially applied to treat superficial, light accessible tumors.

Below is a picture with big science words that explains the process. You may not understand all those big words but what is cool about this picture is that it was created by the researcher of this therapy himself, Dr. Fleury. He and his team are hard at work fine tuning this method. Like him, there are many scientists around the world always researching and trying out new possible ways to cure all kinds of cancers. We think that is very cool!