OnCo
ideasIdea

Robot-placed catheters and live imaging for drug infusion into brain tumours

Pumping drugs slowly through fine tubes into a brain tumour can bypass the barrier, but the fluid often leaks away. Robotic placement and live scans would show where it actually goes.

Convection-enhanced delivery has repeatedly failed in trials, and post-hoc analyses attribute much of the failure to catheter placement and unmonitored backflow rather than to the drug. Robotic stereotactic placement, co-infused imaging tracers and intraoperative MRI make distribution measurable, and chronic implanted port systems permit repeat infusions on an outpatient basis.

Hypothesis
Distribution-verified convection delivery achieves target coverage of over 80% of the intended volume in most patients, and coverage correlates with local control, which would show past failures were delivery failures.
Rationale
No convection trial has reported per-patient coverage as a primary endpoint, so the field has never separated drug failure from delivery failure. Every other interventional field improved once delivery was imaged, as with catheter ablation and endovascular therapy.
What would test it
A device-focused study with co-infused tracer and MRI quantification of coverage for each infusion, reporting the distribution of coverage before any efficacy claim.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
engineering
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
6
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

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Pages like this

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cancers

1
Glioma & glioblastoma

technologies

3
Laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT)MRIRobotic & minimally invasive surgery

terms

1
Blood-brain barrier (BBB)

people

2
Michael WellerRoger Stupp

bottlenecks

3
Failures are hiddenSurgery and radiotherapy cure most, get leastThe brain: barrier and sanctuary