Monitoring the effectiveness of chemotherapy
GENERAL INFORMATION
Maintrak is a blood test to periodically monitor the effectiveness of the most commonly administered/conventional chemotherapy drugs. The method enables optimization and adaptation of chemotherapy to maximize treatment effectiveness. The risk of progression, metastasis and recurrence in patients in remission is monitored by periodic application of the test. The test is based on detection and counting of freely circulating tumor cells.
FREELY CIRCULATING TUMOR CELLS
Malignant growths have the ability to release tumour cells into the bloodstream, thus dissipating into distant tissues and organs and forming so-called distant metastases. Even after successful surgical removal of the tumour, cancer cells remain in the body, capable of causing dissemination and/or recurrence.
CHEMIOTHERAPY
The main aim of chemotherapy is to limit the above complications. In the majority of patients, recurrence and/or metastasis occurs over time despite the administration of long-term chemotherapy. The prerequisite for treatment ineffectiveness lies in the nature of the tumors, which is highly heterogeneous. Tumour cells even in the same patient have different structures and genetics. These cell lines differ in properties such as malignancy, ability to metastasize, divide, proliferate and many others. These cell lines also differ in their sensitivity to chemotherapy. Often, even if effective against a large proportion of tumour cells, chemotherapy remains unable to limit the development of certain resistant cell lines. Consequently, therapies that are effective at the beginning of treatment often lose their efficacy as treatment progresses and unnecessarily burden the patient with side effects. This dynamic behaviour of the tumour, as well as the resistance of some tumour cells to treatment, also necessitates dynamic monitoring and optimisation of treatment.
APPLICATIONS AND ADVANTAGES OF THE MAINTRAK TEST:
- Maintrak tracking allows to assess whether an anti-cancer therapy leads to a reduction of freely circulating tumor cells or not - and therefore to make a timely assessment of its effectiveness;
- Periodic examination of the number and dynamics of tumor cells with Maintrak allows timely response and selection of an effective treatment approach;
- Maintrak allows to monitor the condition of patients in remission. An increase in the number of freely circulating tumors is an early signal of a possible future relapse.
- Maintrak allows chemosensitivity testing to be done. In this option, tumor cells isolated from the patient are treated with different drugs in order to select the most effective chemotherapy.
- Imaging can detect tumours larger than 1 cm. While a tumor that is only 1 mm can release up to 100,000 cancer cells per day into the blood. The Maintrak test can detect changes in tumour cell counts from 50,000 upwards throughout the bloodstream and is therefore very useful as a long-term follow-up test.
COMPARISON WITH TUMOR MARKERS
A tumour marker is a protein that is normally found in the body, but is present in higher amounts in tumour cells. Elevated tumour marker levels are often not consistent with the dynamics of the cancer. On the other hand, in established cancerous growths, the marker signals only dying cancer cells, but not living ones, which can lead to metastasis. The Maintrak test can be used to monitor the effectiveness of a therapy and modify it as necessary according to the levels of freely circulating tumour cells in the body that pose a real risk of disease progression.
The technology of the Maintras test was developed in the "Dr. Pachmann Laboratory" - Bayreuth, Germany. For more information, you can call +359895770869.
