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A newly developed scanning technique can now help determine whether or not a cancer drug works in the patient, in just a day or two. The new imaging technique is hopeful in guiding doctors in rendering appropriate treatment for the patients.

Cancer is one of the most life-threatening diseases affecting millions of people around the world. There are tens of thousands of researchers working on finding the cause as well as a cure for the debilitating disease. While we know, no one treatment can cure different types of cancers seen in patients, researchers have come up with a new scanning technique that helps determine whether or not a cancer drug works in the patient.

"This new technique could potentially mean that doctors will find out much more quickly if a treatment is working for their patient, instead of waiting to see if a tumour shrinks," Dr. Ferdia Gallagher, joint-lead of the Wellcome Trust Strategic Award-funded study, said, according to Independent.

Chemotherapy is the choice of treatment for cancer which involves drugs of very high dosages. While they target killing cancerous cells, in most cases they are equally troublesome to the patient's body. Because of the pain involved and since it is not certain that the drug really works in treating the disease, people tend to give up on chemotherapies.

With the advent of the new technique that helps in finding if the drug works in the patient in just days after administration, researchers are hopeful that appropriate drugs could be given to every patient. Depending on how the drug works in the patient's body the doctors can choose to continue to use it on the patient or switch over to other drugs that work better on them.

Scientists at Addenbrooke's Hospital, part of Cambridge University Hospitals tested a patient in Europe with the new metabolic imaging technique. Pyruvate, a broken down product of glucose, labeled with non-radioactive carbon 13 is administered into the patient's body and is tracked through a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.

The carbon 13 labelled pyruvate, which is 10,000 times more likely to be detected by MRI scan is tracked as they enter the cells of the patient's body. The doctors can now monitor how soon the pyruvate is broken down into the cancer cells, indicating how active the cells are, how they respond to the drugs and whether are not the drug is efficient in killing the cancerous cells.

"Each person's cancer is different and this technique could help us tailor a patient's treatment more quickly than before," said, Professor Kevin Brindle, the study's co-lead researcher, reported IB times. "Finding out early on whether cancer is responding to therapy could save patients months of treatment that isn't working for them."