The Happy Pod: The 'privilege' of helping brain tumour patients

Holly Gibbs (0:00)

This is The Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. I'm Holly Gibbs, and in this edition, the new rapid test that's transforming brain tumor diagnosis.

Simon Payne (0:16)

I'm really excited. I think when the first time we ran this test, and we got it to work in house, and we got it to work really quickly, it felt completely unreal. I will never tire of seeing this approach work.

Holly Gibbs (0:30)

We speak to some of the doctors behind it. Also on this podcast, how one island is celebrating its first baby in more than three decades.

Alice Treel-Ford (0:38)

We have this beautiful home, that's my family home, that's steeped in our history and ancestry. So to be surrounded and supported by that felt very special.

Holly Gibbs (0:50)

Plus, meet Gary.

Gary Summerfield (0:51)

I thought if I was my daughter, I would be searching Ionlow if we had exhausted all avenues through the family and friends. And I just thought, this lady needs one of my kidneys, more than I need two of them.

Holly Gibbs (1:03)

He responded to a social media appeal of a woman who needed a life-saving transplant. And the six-year-old breaking records with a Rubik's Cube.

We start with a story of a medical breakthrough in the diagnosis and treatment of brain tumours. We recently reported this on the Global News Podcast. And in this edition, I'm going to bring you a different interview so we can explore this scientific advancement a bit more. It's a rapid test that can reduce the time it takes to get an accurate diagnosis. From up to eight weeks to just two hours. It's already been used on some patients and it was developed by a team here in England at Nottingham University Hospital.

Dr Stuart Smith, a consultant neurosurgeon and Dr Simon Payne, a consultant neuropathologist. I spoke to them both for this edition of The Happy Pod and started by asking Simon to explain the test.

Simon Payne (2:00)

It's an amazing test and I think to understand why it's an amazing test, you need to know a little bit about brain tumours and how they're diagnosed. They're really complex things as you might guess. They are really difficult to diagnose with confidence. You really need quite in-depth, comprehensive molecular testing to make a diagnosis these days. And that takes a long time. It can be weeks and it's certainly not something you can do within the time period of the operation. And what this test that we've developed building on work of colleagues, frankly, all over the world, but particularly with colleagues here in the university, Professor Matt Luce, principal amongst them, and a PhD student called Simon Deacon, what we've developed is a test that allows you to condense all of those weeks of waiting into about an hour and a half, two hours for an initial result, and then all the other data that you need after 24 hours. It's taking really complex genetic tests and putting them all in one test and speeding it all up.

Holly Gibbs (2:56)

That's amazing. How is this going to help patients? I assume it means that quicker diagnosis means you can catch the tumour early?

Stuart Smith (3:03)

Yeah, I think, as Simon correctly said, there are many, many different types of brain tumour and some of them are more invasive into the brain than others. And we know that the extent and how sort of aggressive we are with the operation in terms of how much we try and remove varies between tumour types. So that information in the operation, I think, will help surgeons make better decisions and to tailor the surgery much more specifically to an individual patient.

Holly Gibbs (3:27)

Well, Stuart, you've actually already used this on a patient, haven't you?

Stuart Smith (3:30)

Yeah, I mean, we've actually used the technique on quite a few patients in the process of checking it. We've run this technique alongside the standard technique and it's pretty much always given us the same answer, so we're confident in its accuracy.

It's also important to say that there's an added benefit beyond the surgery and that the standard techniques that we use, as Simon described, to diagnose the genetics, the DNA and brain tumors are very good, they're very powerful, but they can be quite slow and it can take six to eight weeks to get a full result back for a patient, whereas this current, this new technique will speed that up to a few days and that will allow hopefully patients to progress on to the correct treatment more quickly.

Holly Gibbs (4:12)

And Stuart, what's the feedback been from the patients that have already benefited from this test?