Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have developed an implant, notably as small as a grain of rice, that can test the effects of drugs on a patient’s brain tumor in real-time during surgery. Currently, monitoring the effects of drugs on a brain cancer patient during surgery is limited to intraoperative brain imaging and tissue sampling after a drug has been administered. The technique known as microdialysis currently stands as one of the more minimally invasive sampling options for testing the impact of drugs on brain tumors, but even that requires an entire catheter to be inserted into the patient’s skull cavity.During development, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital designed the device specifically to help test treatments in patients with brain cancers or gliomas, a type of tumor that originates in the brain or spinal cord. The device is designed to only remain implanted in a patient for about two to three hours while it delivers microdoses of the respecti
