New therapy trials show dramatic results.

2002 JUN 13 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Patients of Kimberly Blackwell, MD, jokingly call their treatment table the "booby Jacuzzi." The name may be a bit crass, but then a close brush with mortality entitles these women to call the life-saving contraption whatever they want.

Humor aside, they have come to the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center with the earnest hope of preserving their lives, if not their breasts, from the ravages of deadly breast cancers - inflammatory and locally advanced tumors that often resist traditional treatments. Sixty to 70% of these cancer patients do not survive past 5 years. Twenty-one women came to Duke for a unique phase I trial in search of better odds.

Propped on pillows and serenaded by the music of their choice, the women lie upon a massage-like table for 1 hour as radio frequency energy warms their breasts, which lie in a sunken pool of water. The heat triggers the chemotherapy they have just received to settle inside the tumor, where it trickles out of its protective coating - a tiny fat bubble called a liposome - and attacks the tumor's genetic machinery.

The body's normal tissues remain unheated, so the drug is not preferentially delivered there. Hence, the drugs slowly leak out into normal tissues over a period of 3 or 4 weeks - long enough for the liver and spleen to blunt its toxic side effects.

In several cases, the treatment has remarkably destroyed all visible signs of the tumor. In others, the treatment has saved women's breasts from surgical removal. In every case, it has halted the tumor from growing, said Blackwell, a Duke medical oncologist who runs the protocol with a team of a dozen colleagues.

The results are far more dramatic than any of the team envisioned, based on their preclinical studies, said Blackwell, who presented their phase I clinical trial data at the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Orlando, Florida. Twenty-one women with newly diagnosed breast cancers participated in the 12-week hyperthermia trial, funded by the National Cancer Institute.

"Encapsulating the chemotherapy inside of liposomes enables us to deliver 30 times more chemotherapy than we normally could to the tumor site, without poisoning the rest of the body," said Blackwell. "Heat also boosts the drugs' potency by interfering with mechanisms that control a cancer cell's ability to replicate."