Many patients have never heard of photodynamic therapy, and many others use it as a last resort behind surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. It would be nicer if we could see them earlier. Psychologically, it's a devastating aspect of cancer. More radiation and chemotherapy leads to no change, often incurring more toxicity, both locally on the chest wall and systemically as infection. Depending on the size of the lesion, the laser irradiation can take from two to 20 minutes.
Most patients arrive with multiple lesions and the whole process generally takes three to six hours.
The irradiation is done on the outside of the chest wall and is performed on an outpatient basis. Molecular structures for several photosensitizers. Because the blood vessels feeding a tumor proliferate rapidly, they don't develop an extracellular matrix formed of smooth muscle cells, extra protein, and polysaccharides that preserve the integrity of the blood vessels. These immature blood vessels need the cholesterol for building the cell membranes and suck the LDL out of the plasma as the plasma moves through. But as soon as it enters human blood, the affinity that the drug has for LDL is higher.