For those in the medical device sales industry, it's important to stay on top of treatment trends in order to ensure that physicians are receiving the most up-to-date equipment in order to effectively treat their patients.

With the recent discovery of a new brain tumor treatment, which uses magnets, ultrasound technology and tiny particles that can deliver chemotherapy drugs to specific locations, individuals in the medical device sales field may soon find a higher demand for these products.

Although this could bring on a new market, industry insiders may not see this demand for a while, as the final tests will take a while to complete. According to the Los Angeles Times, the initial study that has been conducted and shown results was on rats, and scientists believe that human trials are at least four or five years away.

For some patients, this innovative treatment may not come quickly enough, as the news provider reports that there are currently few options for people who suffer from brain tumors. For example, surgery and radiation treatments have the potential to damage crucial parts of the brain, and current chemotherapy drugs do not mix well in the blood-brain barrier.

In this new study, researchers from the University of Taiwan injected tiny magnetic beads that were coated with a chemotherapy drug into the rats' tail and used an ultrasound to open up a small region of the blood-brain barrier. Once the pathway was open, scientists used a magnetic field to place the magnetic beads in the precise location of the brain they needed to be. The researchers noted that tumor growth had slowed and rats lived two-thirds longer than the rats that were left untreated.

"The method has significant clinical potential," Dr. Kullervo Hynynen of the University of Toronto Medical School, who conducts similar research but was not involved in the new study, told the news provider.

Many researchers who were not involved with the study commented that although this idea was intriguing, the scientists still had a long way to go before the test can be conducted on humans.

According to MSNBC, Kuo-Chen Wei, the study's co-author and the chief of the brain tumor division at the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan said that he felt although his team will need to fine-tune the technologies, he said they will be ready in five years at the latest.