Development of a Cancer Treatment with Low-Intensity Ultrasound

Abstract

Copyright: © 2013 Emoto M. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. In recent years, research on the usage of ultrasound for cancer treatment has developed and while high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU, FUS) has already been clinically applied to several types of cancers, it is not yet considered as an established treatment. On the other hand, studies using ultrasound energy for cancer treatment have advanced, thus revealing the enhancement of drug effects by employing low-intensity ultrasound. Furthermore, anti-angiogenesis against tumors is now attracting attention as a new cancer treatment. Therefore, our research focused on the biological effects and the enhancement of drug effects brought by this low-intensity ultrasound energy and reported on the efficacy against a uterine sarcoma model, by implementing the basic studies, for the first time, including the concomitant use of low-intensity ultrasound irradiation, as an expected new antiangiogenic therapy for cancer treatment. Furthermore, we have succeeded in simultaneously utilizing low-intensity ultrasound in both diagnosis and treatment, upon real time evaluation of the anti-tumor effects and anti-angiogenesis effects using color Doppler ultrasound imaging [1].