Cancer therapy may get a revival

Cancer specialists are hoping that recent studies will spur renewed interest and use of a 20-year-old treatment that uses heat to enhance chemotherapy or radiation.

Called hyperthermia, the process involves heating tumor tissue to enhance the effects of chemotherapy or radiation. The technology uses focused microwave/radio frequency energy to treat diseases, including cancer, by elevating temperatures precisely within the diseased site.

Because hyperthermia in- creases blood and oxygen circulation within the tumor, it makes a low dose of radiation or chemotherapy more effective, according to recent studies. And that's important in cases of recurrent cancer, where another course of radiation or chemo is either not an option or must be delivered in much lower doses.

It has been "shown quite solidly in the laboratory and clinical results" to work, says Dr. Ellen Jones, associate professor in the radiation and oncology department at Duke University Medical Center, who conducted the most recent research documenting the benefits of adding heat to standard treatments for certain tumors. "It's quite well-tolerated and has a very mild side-effect profile."

Dr. Leland Rogers, a radiation oncologist at Gamma West at Salt Lake Regional Medical Center, first used hyperthermia while training at the University of North Carolina in the 1980s. Then he completed a fellowship at Duke, where many patients were treated that way.

In the years since, he's used hyperthermia for cervix, head and neck cancers, recurrent breast cancers located near the chest wall, and for brain tumors.

The theory has been around a long time, but the technology is new, evolving to overcome problems.

The treatment wasn't widely adopted simply because "we haven't had the technology to uniformly and thoroughly heat the tumor. The main difficulty is the body's response," says Rogers. "Bodies are adept at keeping temperatures stable and that has not been an easy hurdle to get over."

That has changed, he says, thanks in large part to technology that began with research at the University of Utah and was spun off into a company called BSD Medical Corp. Salt Lake City-based BSD has been a leader in creating hyperthermia technology and the treatments "have progressed enough that we now have studies to prove the benefit that we always hoped for and believed."