Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Heating breast-cancer cells with focused beams of microwave energy after chemotherapy can significantly shrink and kill tumors, according to results from a new clinical trial. The treatment increases blood flow into tumors, allowing chemotherapy drugs to more easily invade cancer cells. In patients who received both the heat treatment, known as thermotherapy, and chemotherapy, tumors showed 50 percent more shrinkage than tumors that strictly received chemotherapy.Radiation therapy blankets the entire breast, and what we are trying to do is heat cancer cells in a large region of the breast to kill them.This new technology can also replace extreme treatments like removal of the breast.
Fifteen out of 28 patients received two cycles of chemotherapy, followed a few hours later by thermotherapy, in which a 915-megahertz microwave was focused on the tumor, raising its temperature to 108 ºF. After the combined treatments, 14 of the patients' tumors decreased enough for lumpectomy: the volume of the tumor shrank by about 88 percent, compared with 59 percent in patients who received chemotherapy alone.
There are minimal treatment options for patients with tumors deep in the breast or with large tumors in the intact breast.Thermotherapy will be the best option and one of the only hope for this patients then.
The microwave technology used in the trial was originally developed at MIT as a missile-detection tool.Two plastic plates, one placed on either side, gently compress the breast, while microwave antennae about an inch away from the plates deliver the microwaves, preferentially targeting the high water and high ion content of the breast-cancer cells . The antennae adaptively focus the microwaves at the tumor position. The energy sent through the tumor causes the water molecules to collide and generate heat through friction, eventually elevating the temperature of the tumor.About 100 patients had gone through the microwave treatment.An expectation of 228 more breast cancer patients will be going through the same thing in a larger clinical operation
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