Bubbly drinks may aid cancer treatment

Oxygen microbubbles make treatments for hard-to-treat tumours like pancreatic cancer more potent, according to scientists from Cancer Research UK.

As tumours grow, the blood vessels delivering essential nutrients, including oxygen, become increasingly twisted and weak. This makes it more difficult to deliver chemotherapy drugs to the heart of the tumour. Some tumours adapt to the harsher, low-oxygen conditions, which makes them more resistant to drugs.

Researchers at the University of Oxford and Ulster have been investigating how to reoxygenate tumours, which will enable radiotherapy and chemotherapy to deliver a knockout blow.  

They looked at how oxygen bubbles get from the stomach to pancreatic tumours in the laboratory and then investigated whether this could be done by giving patients the equivalent of a bubbly drink.

The scientists chose pancreatic cancer because these tumours are badly starved of oxygen and so patients have limited treatment options.

Current methods of oxygenating tumours in patients include breathing pure oxygen, putting patients in oxygen chambers or injecting liquids full of oxygen directly into the tumour site. These are effective but can have quite serious side effects, including damage to the surface of the lungs and nervous system.

This new approach could have fewer risks, cost less and easily be used to boost other treatments.

Professor Eleanor Stride, Cancer Research UK scientist at the University of Oxford, said: “We’re especially excited about the potential this bubbly drink could have for hard-to-treat cancers like pancreatic cancer, where survival rates are low and better treatments are urgently needed.

“We’ve had success in the lab in mice, so we’re now looking at how to scale this up for patients.”