The World's First Histotripsy Center

0:00
[Room Sound]
0:02
I was diagnosed um over 5 years  ago with metastatic breast cancer.
0:08
I went to my doctor and I said I had a cyst  in my breast and he felt it and he was like,
0:14
“oh don’t worry about it. You’re  really young um if it feels like
0:18
it’s growing a lot um then come  back but just keep an eye on it.”
0:25
After a year Carrie returned to find  the lump was a cancerous tumor and that
0:30
it had spread to her liver making  her a stage four cancer patient.
0:34
If you’re discovered later stage it’s somehow  your fault like you did something wrong,
0:38
you weren’t paying attention, or you  didn’t follow the you know the norms
0:41
of doing self checks or whatever. I thought  that I did all the things right, like I went
0:46
to my doctor I exercised I ate healthy it  just didn’t turn out the way it should.
0:53
Because the cancer had spread throughout her  liver surgical removal was not an option.
0:58
Um so I did a hormonal treatment that turned  off my ovaries so that I um no longer produced
1:04
estrogen and then I went on a different pill  for a year and then after that I didn’t have any
1:12
more pill options and that’s when I ended up on IV  chemotherapy where I lost my hair and all of that.
1:18
That was very hard because once you lose your hair  you really can’t pretend you don’t have cancer.
1:25
Carrie’s treatments cleared the tumor in her  breast but the spots in her liver persisted,
1:30
pushing her to seek other treatment options.
1:34
As a, as a cancer patient I have to be  an advocate for myself and I have to
1:39
do my research and find out what’s the best  next thing for me that’s going to work well.
1:46
My husband had forwarded me an article  that he’d found about Histotripsy,
1:52
this new treatment that they  were doing clinical trials on.
1:56
Developed by University of  Michigan engineers, Histotripsy
2:00
is a non-invasive cancer treatment that uses  ultrasound waves to break up tumor cells.
2:05
Two decades in the making, it wouldn’t exist today  without the perseverance of biomedical engineering
2:10
Professor Zhen Xu and her team. Histotripsy  actually uses microsecond ultrasound pulses,
2:17
to activate the nanometer gas pockets in our  body and then generate micro-bubbles and make
2:28
the micro-bubbles expand and a collapse within  very short time frame and that creates very
2:34
high mechanical strain and stress to disrupt  the disease cells such as the tumor cells.
2:41
What you get is a procedure that won’t make  patients sick or damage healthy tissue,
2:45
which for people like Carrie is a relief  from years of aggressive treatment.
2:49
In 2022, she took part in the hope4liver  clinical trials at Michigan Medicine.
2:55
I was thinking this is really great  especially for someone like me where
2:59
it’s just cancer in the one place that  keeps coming back in the one place.
3:05
As a radiologist who specializes in cancer  treatment it is not infrequent where I am
3:12
sitting reading an MRI or CT and see very  young patients with very advanced cancer
3:18
and so patients like Carrie who’ve already tried  other treatment options and still have cancer,
3:24
to me those are the patients where you just  want to do anything you can to help them out.
3:29
[talking]
3:30
Carrie’s tumors were treated using  a robotic device developed by
3:33
U of M spin-off HistoSonics.
3:36
[Music]
3:38
The procedure starts with putting  the patient under anesthesia and
3:41
positioning the treatment head over  their abdomen to locate the tumor.
3:45
Once located, clinicians lock on to the tumor
3:48
to emit the sound waves and  break up the diseased tissue.
3:52
It’s fast and painless with many patients  wondering if anything was even done at all.
3:57
I woke up felt fine, um, I think it was either  the next day or the day after that I went to the
4:06
Henry Ford Museum and like walked around  I was okay like got on a plane came home,
4:12
um, went back to work. Like I didn’t have  any like like long-term like soreness or
4:19
pain or anything that you would like expect  from having had a procedure on your liver.
4:25
An MRI immediately after the procedure showed the
4:27
treatment was effective and after  a year of follow-ups the treated
4:31
tumors were completely destroyed with no  recurrent disease in the treated areas.
4:36
It was so cool it’s like that little  parasite got killed you know it’s
4:41
like it’s like little thing is dead  there there’s nothing there anymore.
4:46
It’s outcomes like Carrie’s and other clinical  trial patients that have awarded HistoSonics
4:51
with FDA approval, to sell their tech to hospitals  bringing Histotripsy to cancer patients worldwide.
4:58
It’s really exciting new technology that  I hope really becomes more available to
5:04
everybody and and I hope it’s something that  people can do repeatedly like because that’s
5:09
some one of the problems with a lot of these  Interventional treatments is that you can’t
5:13
do them very often, um, either they’re  too expensive or cause too much damage.
5:18
[Talking]
5:20
I’m just really excited to see, uh,  Histotripsy used in a wider patient population.
5:28
This will allow us expand Histotripsy in  the future for other applications such as
5:33
renal tumor, pancreatic tumor,  or even beyond the cancer such
5:37
as neurological applications and  the cardiovascular applications.
5:41
[Talking]
5:42
In addition to non-invasive treatment,
5:44
early data from rodent studies and the  trials are showing that when the body
5:48
is cleaning up the tumor fragments from  Histotripsy, it forms an immune response.
5:53
So as the blood flows towards  this area all the immune cells
5:58
come and they recognize what we say  the antigen or something foreign in
6:02
this area and they create antibodies,  kind of stimulate an immune response.
6:06
Now let’s say we treat something in the  liver and you have a mass in your lung,
6:10
this, uh, antibody can go to the  lung and fight the lung tumor.
6:14
[Talking]
6:15
Hopefully we can then combine Histotripsy  with immunotherapy, uh, or drug delivery
6:21
so that we can, um, now expand Histotripsy  from a local ablation tool, into a potential
6:29
tool that can treat tumors globally in all  over the body and eventually into a cure.
6:37
[Talking]
6:38
Over a year after Histotripsy, the approach  proved effective but Carrie isn’t cancer-free.
6:43
Additional tumors continue  to grow in the untreated
6:46
areas of her liver but she hasn’t given up.
6:50
When you have this like like major  life derailment, um, kind of forces
6:56
you to put in put into perspective what’s  important and for me I want to live my life.
7:01
I want to continue to live my life  and I’m not ready to give up and,
7:07
um, that’s just kind of what keeps me  going is the the idea that yeah maybe
7:13
I have advanced cancer but maybe I can still  cont contribute to the world and maybe I can
7:20
still manage to beat it somehow if  I can just stick around long enough.
7:29
[Music]