Column: A tale of two medical devices

One of the first Search and Discovery stories I ever wrote, for Physics Today‘s August 2007 issue , was about a novel method some Israeli scientists had developed to use kilohertz-frequency electric fields to treat glioblastoma brain tumors. Colleagues advised me that, while we always want to take care not to overhype any of the results we cover, caution is especially warranted in stories about medical results. Glioblastoma is a frightening malignancy that affects real people, some of whom might come across my story in their desperate search for any experimental treatment that might promise a cure.

Miller’s Diary

Physics Today editor Johanna Miller reflects on the latest Search & Discovery section of the magazine, the editorial process, and life in general.

So I didn’t sugarcoat the researchers’ results: Of the 10 patients in their initial trial, only 3 were still alive at the end of it. But glioblastoma is so deadly that this counts as a good result.

The story was my first taste of wider publicity. The American Institute of Physics (AIP; publisher of Physics Today) put out a press release about it, and some other news outlets picked it up. I even heard from a few readers, some of whom were skeptical that the treatment did anything at all. One objection I remember hearing was that the physics community had worked so hard to convince the public that cell phone radiation doesn’t cause cancer (remember when people were worried about that?), so how could I say that electromagnetic fields can treat cancer? I shrugged and explained that I was just reporting what was in the paper, but inwardly I wondered if the treatment was really all it was cracked up to be.

I was reminded of that story a few years ago by something I saw on CNBC’s Nightly Business Report. The segment featured a company whose “tumor treating fields” sounded a lot like the ones I’d written about. Indeed, they were one and the same: The company, Novocure , had been founded by researcher Yoram Palti even before I wrote the story. And the treatment, branded Optune, had been FDA approved and was being prescribed to patients all over the US. It’s still not a cure, unfortunately, and most glioblastoma patients still succumb to the disease. But from what I can tell , it at least seems effective in buying them more time.

It’s a little bit unusual for Physics Today to cover work that has such an effect on people’s lives. Sure, there’s plenty of research out there at the intersection of the physical and medical sciences, but most of it deals with tissue cultures, imaging phantoms, or other model systems. That kind of work is important, and some of it is even newsworthy. But it’s a long way from the world of real patients and real doctors, and many initially promising ideas never get there.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a short piece about new wireless sensors for monitoring the vital signs of hospitalized newborns. (I’m also writing a longer Search and Discovery story about the same work, in which I’ll go into more detail about how the sensors operate. But the constraints of print publication mean you won’t see that until May.) This isn’t just another study on pie-in-the-sky potential—the devices actually work on real patients. And the researchers aren’t just speculating, as many do, about what good they could do in the developing world—they have active pilot programs in several countries to start using their sensors in hospitals.

There’s still more to be done to get the sensors FDA approved and persuade hospitals to start using them. But if we revisit this work another 10 to 12 years from now, I think we’ll see great things.