Engineering Newsletter

Truman Brown | Biomedical Engineering

Each year more than 1.4 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer, and more than 550,000 die of it. The second most common cause of death in the United States (behind heart disease) typically requires expensive chemotherapy that makes people sick--and may not even work. That’s particularly true for certain kinds of cancer, such as non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Each year 66,000 Americans are diagnosed with this cancer of the lymphatic system, and 19,500 die from it.

Truman Brown, director of magnetic resonance research, is trying to figure out which non-Hodgkins lymphoma patients will do poorly on standard treatment before they go through with it. To do so, he and his team are using magnetic resonance to identify high levels of a certain metabolite, or compound, in the tumors of these patients. About half of non-Hodgkins lymphoma patients--those with high levels of the compound--should skip chemotherapy since it’s useless for them. Instead, if doctors know through the test that standard therapy won’t work on a particular patient, they should head straight to an alternative, such as a bone-marrow transplant.

The goal is similar tests for other kinds of cancer--and ultimately, individualized treatment for all patients. In the future, patients would not go through multiple rounds of an expensive therapy that makes them sick if their doctors knew in advance that they would not respond to it. Instead, they would choose from other options that would work best for them.

In other research, Brown and his team are trying to use magnetic resonance and measures of cerebral blood flow to predict who might get Alzheimer’s disease--and to start taking preventive steps earlier.

Brown, the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Professor of Radiology at the Health Sciences campus is director of the Hatch Center. He received his PhD in physics from MIT and teaches Principles of MRI to undergraduate and graduate students.