"No need for traditional chemotherapy or surgery, but intracorporeal target therapy can eliminate liver tumors! Professor Feng-Ying Chou's research team is the world's first to use Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) to develop a new treatment for liver cancer.

Prof. Feng-Ying Chou said that BNCT is an in vivo targeted radiation therapy, in which patients are injected with boron-containing drug, boric acid (BA), and then irradiated with neutron beams from our atomic reactor for 30 minutes after the drug has accumulated at the tumor site, the high-energy particles produced by the boron neutron capture reaction can effectively kill tumor cells. There are no significant side effects. In other words, just like using boric acid to draw targets on liver tumor cells, the neutron beam can kill liver cancer cells in 100 hits, and "liver cancer cells can be traced wherever they hide. The research has been published in an international journal.

The research results have been published in international journals, patented in Taiwan and the U.S., and the technology has been transferred to Sindong Biotech.

In 2010, National Tsinghua University, Taipei Veterans General Hospital and Kyoto University signed a tripartite cooperation agreement to conduct BNCT clinical cancer treatment research. 2014, the research team has treated 17 patients with recurrent head and neck cancer (malignant tumors of the face, nasopharynx, nasal cavity, oral cavity, throat and neck) for two times with BNCT. Six of the patients had amazing results with complete disappearance of their tumors.

The research team then turned to the treatment of liver cancer, which is one of the top 10 cancers in China， Prof. Chou said that most liver cancers are multi-infarct and have no obvious symptoms in the early stages, so they are mostly terminal when diagnosed clinically and have a mortality rate of 95%.

She further pointed out that the boron-containing drug BPA (boron based phenylalanine) used by head and neck cancer patients is not effective in accumulating in liver tumors, but may accumulate in the pancreas near the liver, so it is not suitable for liver cancer treatment.

Using two mammalian experiments in rats and New Zealand rabbits, the research team demonstrated that BA could selectively accumulate in liver tumor tissues and tumor vessels. After the first BA-BNCT treatment, most of the tumors were reduced in size. The second BA-BNCT treatment was performed on the 20th day after the first treatment, and the physiological condition of the animals was good.

Among them, 93.75% of the tumors disappeared completely after two BA-BNCT treatments. Pathological histological examination showed that there were no tumor cells remaining in the liver and no abnormal changes in normal liver cells. It was also demonstrated that BA-BNCT can deliver sufficient radiation therapy dose to tumor cells and their blood vessels to completely cure multifocal liver cancer without damaging normal liver cells.

In addition, BNCT treatment is more precise and less expensive than proton therapy or heavy particle therapy, which is expected to significantly reduce medical costs.

Currently, the industry has applied to the Center for Drug Evaluation (CDE) for consultation and counseling on the BA-BNCT liver tumor treatment technology, and will later submit an IND application to the Food and Drug Administration (TFDA), and if everything goes smoothly, the human clinical trial will begin in six months at the earliest.

Four years ago, Professor Chou's research team discovered by chance that boric acid selectively accumulates in liver tumor cells, and immediately started to research and experiment until today, we finally saw the opportunity to conduct human trials. However, during this period of time, Prof. Zhou has faced many desperate patients' families, choking up and asking when human trials would be possible. Therefore, even though Prof. Zhou has retired and the treatment technology has been transferred to a manufacturer, he is still working tirelessly to promote the experimental process in the hope that the technology can be used for liver cancer patients soon.

In the future,Prof. Chou hopes to transform BNCT treatment technology into a mobile gas pedal to be placed in hospitals, so that patients can go to the hospital for treatment without having to drag their bodies to the Tsinghua Atomic Furnace. However, this goal requires $1 billion in funding to advance. "This is our mission, and we will continue to work hard to achieve it. We will continue to work hard to achieve it," said Prof. Chou.

Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT)

Treatment Mechanism:

The ideal cancer treatment is to effectively destroy the tumor cells without damaging the normal cells, BNCT is to administer boron-containing drugs to the patient, selectively accumulate the boron drugs at the tumor site, and then irradiate the tumor site with thermal or super thermal neutrons to kill the tumor cells by the high-energy particles released from the boron neutron capture reaction (Cardoso et al., 2009). In boron neutron capture therapy, boron-10-containing drugs are used, and boron-10 atoms have a neutron capture cross section of 3837 barn.

The two particles (7Li and 4He) splitting from the boron neutron capture reaction have large Linear Energy Transfer (LET) energies of 0.48 MeV and 1.47 MeV, respectively, and their energy release distances are 5 μm and 9 μm, which are about the diameter of a mammalian cell (10 μm) (Barth et al. (Barth et al., 2005). Compared to conventional radiotherapy X- and gamma-rays, the high LET of alpha particles is considered to be more cytocidal in tumor treatment because the energy carried by them is released into the cells within a short distance, reducing the possibility of cellular repair (Liao et al., 2010); and the Oxygen Enhancement Ratio (OER) is small, so it is more effective for tumors with fast or slow growth. The Oxygen Enhancement Ratio (OER) is small and therefore can cause damage to both fast and slow growing tumor cells.