A Des Moines hospital is the first in Iowa to perform brain surgery using a new type of treatment called GammaTile therapy.

Dr. Sam Schroeder, a radiation oncologist at UnityPoint Health — John Stoddard Cancer Center, says a postage stamp-sized chip that’s embedded with radiation is implanted in the brain after a tumor is removed.

Aggressive brain tumors, which impact more than 200-thousand Americans a year, tend to resist traditional treatments and have a high recurrence rate.

“If the tumor has returned, the GammaTile allows us to deliver radiation from the inside out, which is very different than the vast majority of radiation treatment, particularly within the brain,” Dr. Schroeder says. “I think it’s a very attractive way to treat an area that’s in a challenging location.”

If a brain tumor returns, he says it’s often treated with external radiation, and a surgeon may go back in and remove the new tumor. That’s where this new technique might best be used.

“There could be that risk that if there are any cells left behind, it can come right back and doing subsequent procedures can be very challenging,” Schroeder says. “So a way of thinking about the GammaTile is, it’s like an insurance policy to minimize the likelihood that a spot should come back in these fairly challenging situations.”

The first GammaTile surgery in Iowa was performed at UnityPoint in Des Moines within the last month, and Schroeder says the technique may only be used on 10 or 20 patients, at least initially.

“We won’t be treating hundreds or thousands of patients a year with this,” he says. “We think it is a very important tool to be able to offer because sometimes, patients are doing very well, aside from maybe a spot that’s causing issue within the brain. So we want to make sure that we can take care of these patients and give them the best treatment possible.”

The FDA-cleared procedure, called Surgically Targeted Radiation Therapy or STaRT, is designed to delay tumor regrowth while preserving healthy brain tissue.

Schroeder says it targets tumor cells precisely where recurrence is most likely, bringing new hope to people with life-threatening brain tumors.

Share this:
Radio Iowa