Researchers of Amirkabir University of Technology have produced scandium-47 radioisotope to relieve pain and treat bone wounds in advanced cancers.
Fatemeh Fathi, the project manager of “Developing a Radiomedicine for Relieving Advanced Cancer Pain”, said pains caused by the spread of cancer to bones are the most common pains in the advanced stages of cancer, especially in breast, prostate and lung cancers.
“This kind of pain severely affects the quality of life of more than 85% of patients at this stage of cancer,” she said.
Noting that other treatments such as painkillers, hormone therapy or even surgery are not effective in reducing cancer pain, Fathi said, “Based on studies conducted in this field, radiotherapy not only fails to have the desired effect, but it could also cause serious side effects on bone marrow or the gastrointestinal tract.”
The project manager advocated the superiority of injectable and oral radiomedicines for their mild side effects, eliminating the need for sophisticated and complex equipment for evaluating and injecting radiomedicines, and for being more cost-friendly, easier to use, more effective in alleviating pain and improving the patients’ lives considerably.
“In the project, an adequate amount of scandium radioisotope was irradiated at Tehran research reactor and then used in the laboratory as radiomedicine,” she said.
“Our experiments on the samples revealed that the absorption of the radiomedicine in mice was significantly more evident in the bones than in other vital organs such as the spleen or the bone marrow. This shows that the radiomedicine can be used to relieve bone pains more effectively,” she explained.
According to Fathi, the performance of this radiomedicine on human body has been predicated through mathematical models, which showed that they could have similar effects on humans.
“The results of the research are very promising. We are very hopeful that the radiomedicine can significantly alleviate chronic pain caused by the spread of multifocal cancers,” she said.
