(WKBW/ABC News) The idea is simple: attack the cancer in the breast - with a direct hit.
That's what the researchers at Johns Hopkins University, along with Breast Cancer Specialist Dr. Susan Love, are trying to do.
They are pumping medicine right to the tumor, avoiding having to remove part of the breast or sending toxic chemotherapy throughout a women's body.
Dr. Love says if this procedure is proven to work, it would eliminate the need to have a mastectomy.
40,000 women a year could use this treatment. The ducts are where most breast cancers begin.
Doctors would take a thin catheter and thread it into the women's
duct, creating a passageway that lets them deliver medicines directly to those tumor cells.
The results are encouraging. They showed no major side effects in patients, and it's worked to knock out the cancer in animals.
