Liver 'balloons' aid cancer fight
The balloons allow a higher dose of the chemotherapy drug to be used
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Thursday, 27, Sep 2007 05:22
'Balloons' placed in the liver could help chemotherapy to be more effective by temporarily stopping blood from leaving the organ, scientists claim.
The New Scientist reports that the hour-long procedure would allow massive doses of chemotherapy to reach tumours in the liver without poisoning the rest of the body.
Chemotherapy drugs are injected into the liver while catheters and balloons divert the blood from leaving it. This blood is then filtered to remove most of the drug before being returned to the body.
Richard Taney, president of Delcath Systems, the New York-based company developing the procedure, said that the amount of drug getting to the tumour is "hundreds of times more than usual".
The procedure allows seven times the normal dose of the chemotherapy drug melphalan to be used and its concentration in the liver is far greater than if it had been injected into the circulation.
In trials involving 13 patients, tumours shrunk by more than half in ten patients within five weeks of being given the new treatment.
They then survived for an average of two years; normally most people with inoperable secondary liver tumours die within eight months of being diagnosed.
In the UK more than 2,800 people are diagnosed with liver cancer each year and the disease causes about the same number of deaths.
Alan Markham, senior medical adviser to Cancer Research UK, told the New Scientist that any improvements to cancer treatment are welcome but warned that none of the previous attempts to isolate the liver during chemotherapy by clamping blood vessels have worked as well as hoped.