00:00 Tim
Smyth playing guitar – wide shot
Pan
along fretboard, tilt up to face
Guide Voice: Tim Smyth is a fairly typical 12
year old boy. He enjoys his hobbies and, just maybe, thinks that
one day this hobby might make him a superstar. But unlike a lot of
young boys, Tim is currently recovering from cancer.
00:14 SOT: Tim Smyth - “It took
about 6 months all in all. It seemed longer but…it was a
hard time. Good it’s all over now.”
00:28 Smyth
family around table, chatting (left to right – Janet, Tim,
Emma, Tom)
Various
shots
Exterior
of Henry Wellcome Building
Interior
and meeting in progress
New
MR Spectrometer
Pump
control computer screen
Guide Voice: Tim was diagnosed with a tumour in
the midline of the brain. A biopsy was needed to confirm that the
tumour was a germinoma and it then responded well to radiotherapy
and had disappeared some 6 months later.
Researchers at the UK's University of Birmingham, in conjunction
with Birmingham's Children's Hospital, are using Tim's experience
to ensure future patients will not have to go through the biopsy
procedure to identify the cancer.
The University of Birmingham is home to the UK’s first 900
MHz Magnetic Spectrometer in its new Henry Wellcome Building for
Biomolecular Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy. It’s one of
only seven in the world and will be a major resource for European
researchers into the root causes of cancer and other diseases.
01:14 SOT: Professor Michael Overduin, Executive
Director, Henry Wellcome Building for Biomolecular MR
Spectroscopy: “It’s one of the
world’s first facilities that allows us to visualise life in
its finest details, we can detect signals from individual atoms
that may be involved in the action of a drug or that may be
involved in the course of a disease for example the molecules that
allow cancer to progress within a brain tumour”.
01:35 Researcher
placing sample in magnet – sequence.
Guide Voice: Because the powerful magnets used
in this facility allow much more detailed analysis of samples, the
scientists here hope to understand how protein molecules behave
within a cell, or how drug molecules interact with their targets.
This will help them to develop new diagnostic methods for cancer
and other diseases, making the facility a leader in the field of
magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
01:57 SOT: Prof. Michael Overduin:
“The magnet behind me is a very powerful magnet,
it’s about 21 teslar in its magnetic field strength. The
magnets you find in a hospital are about 2 teslar, so it’s
about 10 times more powerful than a typical imaging magnet
that’s used in a hospital. So this allows us to see the
chemistry at much higher resolution; the finer details are observed
in this magnet that you wouldn’t see in a medical imaging
magnet”.
02:22
Dr Peet and close
ups on head scan and chemical analysis
Explains
the use of spectroscopy to analyse tumours
SOT: Dr. Andrew Peet, Dept. of Health Clinician
Scientist, Birmingham Children’s Hospital -
“ This is Tim’s head scan, it’s an MR
image that was performed at the time when he was diagnosed. Using
MR spectroscopy we can place a box around the tumour and record the
chemicals that are present within that box. One of the problems
with this method is that it can be difficult to interpret the data
we get. Each of the peaks here is a representation of a certain
chemical or group of chemicals in the tumour but, as you see some
of these peaks overlap with each other, this one here is quite
broad, and the quality of data is not as good as we would like. So,
what we can do is we can take the samples from the tumour and bring
them over to the centre here and use the much more powerful magnets
to get much more detailed information on the chemicals that are
present within the tumour”.
03:25 Tim
and guitar
Guide Voice: So samples from Tim’s
biopsy, analysed at the new centre, will help researchers to draw a
profile of his tumour that will improve diagnosis and treatment of
future patients, reducing the need for invasive surgery.
03:40 SOT: Dr. Andrew Peet; “Well,
what we’d like to do is both help ourselves to diagnose
childhood cancer and to tailor the treatment that we have to the
individual patient and, by an increased understanding of the
chemistry of these tumours, we can group them into tumours that we
can treat individually”.
03:59 SOT: Tim Smyth:- “I feel fine
now. I just feel normal again. So, it’s
wicked”.
04:07
END
