Device called a limb-saver

German researchers believe that the arms or legs of many cancer patients who face amputation can be saved by pairing chemotherapy with technology from a Utah company.

A report given during the most recent conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology found that limbs were spared in 79 percent of the sarcoma patients studied, by combining regional hyperthermia and chemotherapy. Afterward, conventional therapy is used, such as surgery, radiation and post-operative chemotherapy.

Regional hyperthermia uses microwave to target specific cancerous tissue, raising its temperature to "feverlike" levels. A temperature of a high fever, such as 106 degrees, is safe for normal tissue. But cancer hates it. Because cancer usually outgrows its blood and oxygen supply and fever draws blood to an area, the German doctors used the hyperthermia to improve delivery of chemotherapy to the sarcoma, said Hyrum A. Mead, president of BSD Medical Corp., a Salt Lake-based company that created the hyperthermia-delivering machine.

Besides that, with fever temperatures, "tumors shrink and a good portion of them die," said Mead. "They can't resist the heat like regular tissue."

Some chemotherapy drugs also seem to work better at higher temperatures, he said. Hyperthermia has also been used in conjunction with radiation.

Use of regional hyperthermia as a tool against cancer is the subject of ongoing research in the United States, Europe and Japan.

The researchers, from Ludwig-Maximilians University, GSF-National Research Center for Environmental Health and the Institute of Molecular Immunology, all of Munich, Germany, used a BSD-2000 machine by BSD, a company that spun out of University of Utah research in the late 1970s. In the ensuing decades, the technology has been refined, and enhanced, Mead said.

The device has FDA approval for use as an investigational device, and the company is in the process of asking for market approval as well, Mead said.

All the studies so far into use of the hyperthermia device have been funded by government agencies like the National Institutes of Health and equivalent European agencies, he said.

More information is available at bsdmc.com.

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E-mail: lois@desnews.com