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Unlike most of us, inventors look at seemingly intractable problems and see opportunities for innovation.
That’s exactly what biomedical engineer Charles Cain and his colleagues did to create a novel ultrasound surgical tool that destroys prostate cancer tumors.
The patented device uses tightly focused pulses of ultrasound that work like thousands of micro-scalpels to shred and liquefy tumors without damaging surrounding tissues.
The technique has been highly successful in animal tests. With the help of the Office of Technology Transfer and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, Cain’s team is launching an Ann Arbor-based startup, HistoSonics, to make the non-invasive surgical tool available to patients, pending approval by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
“It works far beyond our expectations, and many people will tell you it’s probably going to revolutionize the way ultrasound therapy is done,” says Cain, who was the founding chair of the Biomedical Engineering Department (BME).
Cain is one of several U-M inventors whose work will be featured Oct. 1 at the annual Celebrate Invention reception. The free event will be held in the Michigan League Ballroom, 911 N. University Ave., from 3-6 p.m.
The reception honors U-M researchers who filed a technology disclosure, received a patent or participated in a license agreement in the previous year. (See related story, right.) Other U-M inventors scheduled to participate in this year’s event include:
• Farnam Jahanian, Jon Oberheide and Evan Cooke, who developed CloudAV, antivirus software that increases protection against malware while simplifying and improving the performance of computer software;
• Se Hyun Ahn and L. Jay Guo, who invented a roll-to-roll nanoimprint technology that provides unprecedented speed for large-area, nanoscale patterning on flexible and rigid substrates; and
• David Martin, Sarah Richardson-Burns and Jeffrey Hendricks of Biotectix LLC, who created new materials and nanotechnological solutions to improve the safety, longevity, biocompatibility and performance of electrical biomedical devices.
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Biomedical engineer Cain calls his invention a cavitation-based, image-guided ultrasound surgical tool.
For more than 20 years, Cain’s research has focused on therapeutic uses of high-intensity ultrasound, primarily thermal applications using heat to destroy diseased tissues.
Thermal ultrasound has been widely studied as a non-invasive treatment for cancers and other diseases. But progress has been slowed by some seemingly insurmountable problems, says Cain, the Richard A. Auhll Professor of Engineering and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
Chief among them is the inability to get real-time images that guide surgeons to their target and allow them see the treated tissues as soon as the procedure is completed.
To overcome the imaging problems, Cain turned to bubbles. Thousands and thousands of tiny bubbles called micro-bubbles.
The use of high-intensity, focused ultrasound produces micro-bubbles through a process called cavitation. Most thermal-ultrasound researchers do their best to minimize cavitation, because uncontrolled bubbles can scatter the ultrasound beam, causing it to miss the target tissues.
“Conventional wisdom is that you should avoid cavitation, but I saw it as an opportunity,” Cain says.
After studying the properties and behavior of cavitation micro-bubbles for about five years, Cain and his colleagues figured out how to control them — and how to use them therapeutically in a technique he calls histotripsy. Translated from its Greek roots, the newly coined word means “breaking soft tissue.”
First, a pulse of high-intensity, tightly focused ultrasound is used to create a cloud of tens or hundreds of thousands of microscopic bubbles in the target tissue. The bubble cloud reflects sound waves, forming a bright spot on the ultrasound image.
That bright spot tells the surgeon exactly where the ultrasound “micro-scalpels” are focused.
Then additional pulses of lower-intensity ultrasound agitate the cells in the target tissue, shaking them violently until they rip apart and liquefy — kind of like tossing them into a blender and hitting the puree button.
The surgeon controls the location of the beam’s focal point with a joy stick and views the procedure on a computer monitor, in real time. Once the bright spot on the ultrasound image vanishes, the surgeon knows the diseased cells have been destroyed.
“Charles and his associates said, ‘Let’s not try to get rid of these bubbles. Let’s see if there’s something useful we can do with them.’ That’s great innovation,” said Jim O’Connell, director of the Coulter Project at BME.
The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation is providing the department $1 million a year over five years to support biomedical inventions with the potential to help patients. Cain’s group received $100,000 from the program this year and has been awarded $350,000 to date.
The program teams a biomedical engineer with a clinician at the Medical School. Cain’s medical collaborator is urologist Dr. William Roberts.
“Coulter is trying to encourage a culture change,” O’Connell says. “They want researchers like Charles to look beyond basic research — right from the start of any project — and ask themselves the question, ‘Can I make a product that’s going to help someone?'”
