Will Chemo succeed or not?

Less than half the patients diagnosed with cancer respond favourably to chemotherapy. Now, a new method for testing how patients will respond to various drugs could pave the way for more personalized treatment.

Using Doppler light scattering, like a weather radar, researchers can determine how a patient will respond to chemotherapy even before they begin treatment.

“Doppler weather radar sends electromagnetic waves into clouds, and while you don’t see individual rain droplets, you pick up the overall motion of the raindrops. What you create with this is a 3D map of cloud motion. We’re looking at the motion inside living tissue rather than rain droplets, and we’re using infrared light instead of radar. It’s like watching the weather inside living tissue as the tissue is affected by cancer drugs,” says David Nolte, distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University.

Tiny chunks of tissue taken from a biopsy are placed in a multiwall plate, where various drugs are applied. Light from an LED shines into the middle of the tissue, and researchers look at the scattered light coming off.

In collaboration with John Turek, professor of basic medical sciences, and Mike Childress, associate professor of veterinary medicine, Nolte has built a library of data to associate various light patterns with the corresponding response of patients to treatment.

The findings report an 84 percent success rate predicting patient response to therapy in the group’s first complete pre-clinical trial.