A new breakthrough treatment could prolong life of cancer patients.
Doctors at the Southampton General Hospital bathed just one organ in chemotherapy for the first time in UK.
According to the Daily Mail, doctors treated two patients’ livers with chemotherapy drugs, limiting the exposure of healthy organs. This happened by separating the liver from the body using two balloons and “soaking” it in a high dose of drugs. Dr. Brian Stedman drained the blood from the liver from the patient. Then he filtered it through a machine to reduce the toxic side-effects before infusing it back via the jugular vein. The treatment is known as chemosaturation therapy or percutaneous hepatic perfusion (PHP) and allows higher doses of drugs to be given to the patient without actually causing damage to the healthy tissue.
A recent study in the U.S. confirmed that patients on PHP survived five times longer before the metastatic melanoma spread than patients who were treated with standard chemotherapy. This is mainly due to the lack of side-effects with the new treatment.
According to Dr. Stedman, the PHP could be used for many other types of cancer – colon, breast and melanoma cancers. The treatment was also used in Germany, France, Italy and Ireland.
