Gimme the paint!

This may look like a slightly disgusting picture but its a picture of a tumor as it would be inside one's body with and without the new tumor paint.

The left shows a tumor image on an MRI. The right shows the bad stuff lit up with the toxin from the Israeli Deathstalker scorpion (I'm not making this up) and shows the bad stuff - the stuff the surgeon wants to cut out. The other colors represent the good stuff.

This works on brain, breast and other tumors. I find this incredibly cool. Now surgeons go in and look at MRI and other imaging and figure out which are the good cells and which contain the cancer cooties. They would guess and use their experience. But if they took a few too many brain cells, the patient may never be the same. This is also why surgeons have problems getting clean margins because they are doing some guess work.

I love this quote:

'"In a matter of 10 years, surgeons will look back and say, 'I can't believe we used to remove (tumors) by using our eyes and our fingers and our thumbs,' " Olson says.'

Read all about it here. I find this very exciting! I want that paint before any more cancer surgeries.