Lung
carcinoma is the leading cause of
cancer mortality in the Western countries. Despite the introduction over the last few years of new therapeutic agents, survival from
lung cancer has shown no discernible improvement in the last 20 years. For these reasons any efforts to find and validate new effective therapeutic procedures for
lung cancer are very timely. The selective
boron uptake in the tumour with respect to healthy tissues makes
Boron Neutron Capture Therapy a potentially advantageous option in the treatment of tumours that affect whole vital organs, and that are surgically inoperable. To study the possibility of applying BNCT to the treatment of diffuse pulmonary tumours, an animal model for
boron uptake measurements in lung
metastases was developed. Both healthy and tumour-bearing rats were infused with Boronophenylalanine (BPA) and sacrificed at different time intervals after
drug administration. The lungs were extracted, and prepared for
boron analysis by neutron autoradiography and α-spectroscopy. The
boron concentrations in tumour and normal lung were plotted as a function of the time elapsed after BPA administration. The concentration in tumour is almost constant within the error bars for all the time intervals of the experiment (1-8 h), while the curve in normal lung decreases after 4 h from BPA infusion. At 4 h, the ratio of
boron concentration in tumour to
boron concentration in healthy lung is higher than 3, and it stays above this level up to 8 h. Also the images of
boron distribution in the samples, obtained by neutron autoradiography, show a selective absorption in the
metastases.