Photodynamic Therapy of Oral Cavity Tumors in Low Resource Settings: Technology Development, Feasibility and Evaluation in Patients

Oral cancer is one of the leading diseases in the Southeast Asian countries due to unhealthy habits (chewing of tobacco and related preparations like Gutka). Surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy are expensive, require significant infrastructure and have detrimental side effects and lead to poor quality of life. We present a light-based therapy namely Photodynamic therapy (PDT) that showed promise, specifically excellent mucosal healing, in treatment of oral cancers and other malignancies. To make PDT a low-cost modality, we custom designed a battery powered light source coupled with fiber delivery and oral applicators for irradiating the lesion field. Here we demonstrate the stability of the oral applicators in human mouth followed by a pilot study in oral cancer patients to demonstrate therapy response with our custom-built light delivery system.