Skin Cancer Treatment Comes Home
This story was filed by CBSNews.com's Tucker Reals in London.
Researchers in Scotland unveiled Friday a new treatment for skin cancer that is almost as easy for patients to use, and doctors to administer, as a simple band-aid.
The Ambulight PDT therapy allows doctors to get patients with increasingly common non-melanoma skin cancer in and out of the hospital in just minutes and leaves virtually no scar.
Dermatology professor James Ferguson, who was involved in the clinical trials at Scotland's Dundee University, tells CBSNews.com the biggest advantage to the Ambulight is that it's simply "a lot less painful".
It uses the same principles as light treatments available for years; covering the cancerous skin patch with a light-sensitive cream which is absorbed only by the cancer cells, then blasting the area with a beam of light that turns the cream into a toxic compound. It effectively kills the cancerous cells without affecting the surrounding tissue.
What makes the Ambulight PDT novel is its size and portability. The light emitting device is about the size of a computer mouse.
Patients have cream applied to the lesion, have a clear bandage placed over the cream, and then fix the Ambulight PDT to the bandage. It can do the rest of the work while the patient remains mobile.
"This new device can be taken away home with the patients," Ferguson explained to the BBC. "It is escaping from the hospital environment, making for a gentler approach to skin cancer treatment."
Not just gentler, but potentially far cheaper for hospitals, which would not have to bear the huge costs and manpower associated with in-patient treatment.
The Ambulight PDT will now be available at hospitals across the United Kingdom.
Ferguson tells CBSNews.com he sees no reason why it shouldn't be available to U.S. skin cancer patients in the near future, pending approval.
The medicines and light combination involved has been in use in the United States for years, "it's just a new way of delivering it that happens to be much more comfortable," Ferguson tells CBS News.
According to Ferguson, both the United States and Great Britain are seeing a huge increase in the number of non-melanoma skin cancers reported each year.
The rising popularity of sun-beds "will be a contributor" to that trend, but Ferguson says it is down to a combination of factors.
One of the most promising aspects of the Ambulight PDT, according to the professor, is the scope for further development of the technology.
At present, PDT, or photodynamic therapy, is used in about a quarter of non-melanoma skin cancers, but Ferguson says there is now "room to improve upon" that figure, possibly making the small device effective for the treatment of larger, deeper lesions.