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Comment by AlphaWeaver | Hacker News Reader

Could this work against any/most cancers?

It won't work for liquid tumours (i.e. blood cancers) since they "metastasise" to the whole vein/artery network.

Cancers in the brain/lungs/bone, unlikely, since the speed of sound is very different between bone/air and flesh. Though I could be wrong.

But for any solid tumour, it should work well.

Not every tissue passes ultrasound as well as the liver so it might need fine tuning for different tissues.

The liver also regenerates a lot faster which probably helps mitigate off-target effects.

According to the articles, it causes very little off-target damage.

Won't work for metastasized cancers for obvious reasons. Perhaps it will also be limited by bones just like regular ultrasound where their echoes produce shadows. I could be wrong though.

Ultrasound in general is also operator dependent: the skill of the human doctor matters. Limits scalability.

In rodent studies, it actually does help with metastasis. It breaks tumor cells apart in a way that makes them recognizable by the immune system, which goes on to kill other cancer cells throughout the body. We'll have to see what happens long-term in humans treated with it.

That was unexpected and really interesting. I hope the results turn out to be good.

That's the impression I was getting from reading the article and other articles related to histotripsy. Still, it sounds too good to be true, so I'm wondering the same thing.

I was a little confused on why they can't use it on her other tumors that are growing in her liver.

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