The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of sound waves to break down tumors—a technique called histotripsy—in humans for liver treatment.
And histotripsy’s potential benefits go beyond tumor destruction. In the last year, a pair of preclinical studies in rodents suggest that in the clean-up process, the immune system learns how to identify cancer cells as threats. This can enable the body to continue fighting the initial tumor and help activate a natural immune response to the cancer.
Hopefully, but I thought one of the major obstacles of getting a person’s immune system to fight cancer was that it has caused it to then attack healthy cells as well
Is there something unique about this approach that makes this less likely, or is my initial understanding of the problem wrong?
But even as an adjuvant treatment it could potentially decrease the need for chemo- or radiotherapy if a good chunk of the tumor can be destroyed beforehand.