Even though brain cancers are not among the most common types of cancer accounting for approximately 3% of all tumors,¹ the therapy of brain tumors is a very important issue. First, they are especially abundant in children and adolescents. Here 22.9% of all cancers diagnosed originate in the brain and only leukaemia is more prevalent than tumors of the central nervous system.¹ Second, since metastases are the most prevalent type of brain tumors, dealing with brain cancer will give valuable insight into the process of metastasizing, which is, to a large extent, responsible for the lethality of cancer.

Lipophilic taxanes can be dissolved in contrast media at significantly higher concentration than in saline. As contrast media have occasionally been observed to delineate the contour of coronary arteries for some seconds they may serve as a matrix for an antiproliferative drug aimed at preventing restenosis. The aim of this study was to test a novel taxane-contrast agent formulation for this new approach in the setting of coronary stenting. In cell culture experiments (bovine vascular smooth muscle cells), 60-min incubation with contrast agent-taxane formulations (iopromide-paclitaxel, iopromide-protaxel) induced a significant, concentration-dependent inhibition of vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) proliferation over 12 days. Shorter incubation times of 10 and 3 min showed the same efficacy. For in vivo investigation, 16 stents were implanted into the coronary arteries of eight pigs using a 1.3 to 1 overstretch ratio. A control group received iopromide 370 alone while the treatment group was injected with a iopromide-protaxel formulation at a dose of 74 micromol/l, which is far below protaxel levels inducing systemic toxicity. Quantitative angiography and histomorphometry of the stented arteries asserted statistic equality of the baseline parameters between the control and treatment groups. After 28 days, the treatment group showed a marked reduction of the parameters characterizing in-stent restenosis, especially a 34% reduction of the neointimal area. First evidence is provided that using a contrast agent as solvent for a taxane constitutes a new drug delivery mechanism able to inhibit in-stent restenosis in the porcine restenosis model.

Infrared spectroscopy enables the identification of tissue types based on their inherent vibrational fingerprint without staining in a nondestructive way. Here, Fourier transform infrared microscopic images were collected from 22 brain metastasis tissue sections of bladder carcinoma, lung carcinoma, mamma carcinoma, colon carcinoma, prostate carcinoma and renal cell carcinoma. The scope of this study was to distinguish the infrared spectra of carcinoma from normal tissue and necrosis and to use the infrared spectra of carcinoma to determine the primary tumor of brain metastasis. Data processing follows procedures that have previously been developed for the analysis of Raman images of these samples and includes the unmixing algorithm N-FINDR, segmentation by k-means clustering, and classification by support vector machines (SVMs). Upon comparison with the subsequent hematoxylin and eosin stained tissue sections of training specimens, correct classification rates of the first level SVM were 98.8% for brain tissue, 98.4% for necrosis and 94.4% for carcinoma. The primary tumors were correctly predicted with an overall rate of 98.7% for FTIR images of the training dataset by a second level SVM. Finally, the two level discrimination models were applied to four independent specimens for validation. Although the classification rates are slightly reduced compared to the training specimens, the majority of the infrared spectra of the independent specimens were assigned to the correct primary tumor. The results demonstrate the capability of FTIR imaging to complement histopathological tools for brain tissue diagnosis.

The term “multiforme” in glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) indicates the highly variable histomorphology that cannot be addressed by studies on homogeniz