A new way to treat torn ACLs, bedside MRIs, possibly even a cure for sickle cell disease. These and other breakthroughs all happened while the pandemic absorbed the world’s attention. Here’s what may have flown under your radar. COVID-19 has been all-consuming. For nearly two years, the world has been focused on the race for vaccines, the pressures on providers, the best testing protocols, and simply staying safe.

COVID-19 also slowed some research efforts, but scientists still managed to seek solutions for many other pressing concerns like Alzheimer’s disease, maternal mortality, and prostate cancer among them that have bedeviled patients for decades. Below are eight medical advances that may not have grabbed your attention but could ultimately improve the lives of millions.

Rolling MRIs into hospital rooms:

Assessing a stroke demands a rapid, life-or-death assessment: Is the culprit a clot, which requires a blood thinner, or bleeding in the brain, which requires surgery? Now, a portable MRI device can help make that assessment right at a patient’s bedside and in much less time than required by a trip to a standard machine.

The Swoop MRI which was created with input from Yale Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in August 2020 and is already at work in several U.S. hospitals. The new portable machine offers many advantages over its massive cousin, says Yale neurologist Kevin Sheth, MD.

“The very strong magnets in regular MRIs bring a lot of challenges,” he explains. “You need intensive power and cooling, precautions like a shielded room, and a lot of training. If you use a weaker magnet, all those problems go away.” The weaker magnet is effective, according to an August 2021 study, which asked clinicians to identify various cerebral pathologies using Swoop images. “The goal is not to be as good as a high-magnet MRI, but to be good enough for clinical decisions,” says Sheth, who co-authored the study but has no financial interest in Hyperfine, the Connecticut-based company that produces the machine.

Swoop’s size it’s smaller than some refrigerators eliminates the need to move frail patients down hospital hallways. What’s more, its cost around $100,000 compared to $1 million for the bigger machine puts it within reach of hospitals and regions with fewer resources. “This could essentially democratize brain imaging,” argues Sheth.

Rolling MRIs into hospital rooms:

Prostate cancer strikes 1 out of 8 U.S. men, and it is expected to take more than 34,000 lives this year alone. When it metastasizes, the disease is almost always incurable, leaving physicians focused only on postponing death and improving patients’ lives. A promising new approach has succeeded at both goals and did so among men with an advanced form of the disease whose condition had deteriorated despite receiving standard treatments.

In fact, it more than doubled how long patients lived without their cancer worsening, according to a paper published in September. The study, which followed 831 men in 10 countries for a median of 20 months, compared patients who continued to receive standard care with ones who got the new treatment. The treatment’s name is complex: lutetium-177-PSMA-617. But its approach is straight forward: Drive radiation directly into a cancer cell while sparing healthy tissue around it.

The method uses a compound called PSMA-617 to hone in on a protein found almost exclusively in prostate cancer cells, explains Oliver Sartor, MD, study co-lead investigator and medical director of Tulane Cancer Center in New Orleans. Then, a radioactive particle carried by the compound blasts the cancer cells, wherever they are.
“It’s like a little smart bomb,” says Sartor. In September, the FDA granted the treatment priority review status, according to drug manufacturer Novartis, which funded the study. An answer is expected in the first half of 2022. Sartor feels hopeful. “I’ve been working in prostate cancer for more than 30 years, and this is the largest advance I’ve ever been associated with.”