A team of Heriot-Watt University experts are contributing to the development of techniques to precisely remove brain cancer cells using lasers.

The project, led by Imperial College London, has received £500,000 in funding from the UK’s Medical Research Council as part of a wider bid to tackle hard-to-treat cancers.

The Heriot-Watt team will provide laser ablation work for the project, which involves removing tissue via laser beam exposure. This will then be combined with Imperial’s technique for diagnosing cancer, which incorporates metabolic profiling equipment and offers real-time data on the cancer’s nature.

The collaborative project, known as “Developing Novel Technology for Data Driven Clinical Decision Making,” will focus on Glioblastoma (GBM), an aggressive and fast-growing brain tumour.

Speaking on it, Imperial’s Dr Lauren Ford and overall project lead, said: “Glioblastoma brain tumours are deadly and incurable. Effective treatment options for GBM are urgently needed. The extent of surgical GBM tumour resection substantially impacts patient survival, but damage to normal brain can severely affect quality of life.”

Dr Ford said that, in all cases, some cancer cells remain and are treated with radiochemotherapy. However, this subsequent treatment only delays tumour regrowth and patient death by an average of three months.

Applied optics and photonics expert professor Jonathan Shepard, from the university’s Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences, is leading the Heriot-Watt laser team.

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“The unique proprieties of lasers allow them to be tightly focused and deliver energy that can vaporise material in an incredibly small region without affecting or heating the surrounding area. Lasers therefore have the potential to precisely remove tumour tissue whilst leaving vital, healthy tissue undamaged,” he said.

“In this project, we will investigate fine-tuning the laser parameters to simultaneously remove tissue and generate a vapour plume full of biological information that could be used for diagnosis in a way that current surgical tools cannot.

“The aim is to provide a more complete removal of the tumour and a highly customised treatment pathway to tackle recurrence. Funding such as this scheme, that allow adventurous research ideas, enables us to investigate new combinations of technologies which have the potential to transform cancer treatment in the future.”

UK science and technology secretary Michelle Donelan commented on the funding scheme, which also provided £500,000 each to three other cancer-combatting projects. “By investing in high-risk but high-reward techniques – including artificial intelligence – we are backing our ambitious, world class researchers to build on generations of discoveries and give more people a fighting chance to live long and healthy lives,” she said.