Western researchers advance electric field therapy for aggressive brain cancer

A decade ago, Dr. Matthew Hebb was using tiny electrodes implanted deep in the brain to treat Parkinson's disease—sending electrical signals to quiet the tremors that made his patients' hands shake. One day he wondered: what if the same wires could fight cancer instead?

Hebb, a neurosurgeon at Western University's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, took tumour samples from the operating room back to his lab, threaded electrodes through them, and switched on the current. The cancer cells responded. They stopped growing. That moment of unexpected observation set off a chain of research that has now produced what the team calls Intratumoral Modulation Therapy—a method that uses low-amplitude electric fields to jam up the machinery of glioblastoma, one of the cruelest brain cancers known.

Glioblastoma kills quickly. Even after surgery to remove it, radiation to burn it, and chemotherapy to poison it, patients live a median of just over a year. The cancer cells divide so fast, so relentlessly, that the tumour comes roaring back near the surgical site. Hebb's team decided to attack that division itself—not by burning the cells with heat, but by applying an electric field that essentially freezes them mid-split, stalling the process before it can complete.

The latest results, published this month in Neuro-Oncology Advances, show the approach working in rats. Researchers implanted three electrodes around the tumour and, by shifting the timing of the electrical pulses from each one, created a rotating electric field that swept across the cancer like a searchlight. After seven days, the tumours had shrunk to one-fifth their original size. The growth rate dropped eight-fold. And the surrounding brain tissue—the healthy neurons that make you think and move and feel—showed no damage at all.

Erin Iredale, a postdoctoral researcher who has been working on this project since her undergraduate years, led the study. She spent her PhD developing a treatment-planning system that could one day let a doctor feed a patient's MRI scan into a computer and get back a precise blueprint: where to place the electrodes, how much current to send, how to angle the field so it covers every corner of the tumour and leaves no hiding place for cancer cells. "We're basically triangulating the tumour," she said. The team used computational models to predict how the fields would spread through brain tissue, then confirmed those predictions by measuring the actual electrical activity.

The work is still in animals. The prototype is still being built. But Iredale and her colleagues—physicists, biomedical engineers, anatomists, all working in the same lab—are already thinking about the next step. Within five to ten years, she hopes to see the first patients enrolled in a clinical trial. If it works, if the electric fields can slow or stop glioblastoma the way they do in the lab, it would become another tool in the arsenal against a disease that has resisted nearly everything medicine has thrown at it. For now, the electrodes are still in the rats. But the path to the human brain is being cleared.