Focused Ultrasound Therapy
Focused ultrasound is a noninvasive, therapeutic technology with the potential to improve the quality of life and decrease the cost of care for patients with bladder tumors. This novel technology focuses beams of ultrasound energy precisely and accurately on targets deep in the body without damaging surrounding normal tissue.
How the Works
Where the beams converge, focused ultrasound produces precise ablation (thermal destruction of tissue) enabling bladder tumors to be treated without surgery.
One preclinical study in the 1990s found that focused ultrasound could be used to destroy bladder tissue. There has been some recent work looking at the concept of using focused ultrasound to provide organ sparing surgery for patients with bladder cancer at UCLA. This preclinical work showed that one can use focused ultrasound in a transmural, full thickness ablation of an intact bladder wall. Further work needs to be done to demonstrate the impact of these approaches in patient care.
Advantages
The primary options for treatment of bladder cancer include medication and invasive surgery.
For certain patients, focused ultrasound could provide a noninvasive alternative to surgery with less risk of complications – such as surgical wound healing or infection – at a lower cost. Focused ultrasound can also reach the desired target without damaging surrounding tissue, and it can be repeated, if necessary.
Clinical Trials
At the present time, there are no clinical trials recruiting patients for focused ultrasound treatment of bladder tumors.
The Foundation updates these pages regularly, but with the increasing number of clinical trials, we want to be sure that our audience has the latest information available. Therefore, we also added the website search information for the above trials. If you click here, it will take you to the latest information available from https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/.
Find a Treatment Site
Search for a treatment center or clinical trial near you.
Regulatory Approval and Reimbursement
Focused ultrasound treatment for bladder tumors is not yet approved by regulatory bodies or covered by medical insurance companies.
Notable Papers
Delattre V, Cambronero S, Chen Y, Haar GT, Rivens I, Polton G, Lafon C, Melodelima D. In vivo exposure of the bladder using a non-invasive high intensity focused ultrasound toroidal transducer. Ultrasonics. 2024 Jan 3;138:107239. doi: 10.1016/j.ultras.2024.107239. PMID: 38211366
Panzone J, Byler T, Bratslavsky G, Goldberg H. Applications of Focused Ultrasound in the Treatment of Genitourinary Cancers. Cancers (Basel). 2022 Mar 17;14(6):1536. doi: 10.3390/cancers14061536.
Weitz AC, Lee NS, Yoon CW, Bonyad A, Goo KS, Kim S, Moon S, Jung H, Zhou Q, Chow RH, Shung KK. Functional Assay of Cancer Cell Invasion Potential Based on Mechanotransduction of Focused Ultrasound. Front Oncol. 2017 Aug 7;7:161. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2017.00161. eCollection 2017.
de Castro Abreu AL, Ukimura O, Shoji S, Leslie S, Chopra S, Marien A, Matsugasumi T, Dharmaraja A, Wong K, Zaba N, Ma Y, Desai MM, Gill IS. Robotic transmural ablation of bladder tumors using high-intensity focused ultrasound: Experimental study. Int J Urol. 2016 Jun;23(6):501-8. doi: 10.1111/iju.13083.
Click here for additional references from PubMed.