Turning Up The Heat On Cancer
New Treatment Harnesses Heat
To
Fight Tumors
DURHAM, N.C., April 19, 2006
(CBS) Cancer remains the second-leading cause of death in the United
States. Now, doctors are
experimenting with a promising, yet basic tool to fight it: heat. CBS News correspondent Elizabeth
Kaledin takes a look at how they’re trying to do it.
When
Emma Jean Wilson found a lump in her breast, doctors told her the prognosis
was bleak. The cancer was “very
rare,” she says. “About one in
three million, and only one percent is in your breast.”
It
was angio-sarcoma. Rather than rely
on chemotherapy and radiation alone, Wilson decided to turn up the heat on
her treatment – literally. She
enrolled in a clinical trial at the Duke University Medical Center,
becoming one of thousands of volunteers who, along with doctors, are hoping
that something as simple as heat can improve standard cancer treatment.
“They
said, ‘what we’ll do is we’ll fix a table and your breast will lay in a
bath of water and we’ll sort of microwave your breast’…and I said ‘what??’
Wilson laughs. “That’s really what
it is.”
Duke
is one of a handful of research institutions pioneering a new field called
hyperthermia. While scientists have
known for centuries that heat has healing powers, Duke’s Mark Dewhirst has
figured out how to harness that heat and direct it right into tumors.
“The
temperatures that we are looking for are at the range between 104 and 113
degrees Fahrenheit,” Dewhirst says.
“At that range, we get the effects we want but we don’t burn the
tissue.”
Wilson
says the treatment can get uncomfortable by the end of a session, but the
benefits may well be worth the discomfort.
Dewhirst
and his colleagues know that the heat weakens tumors in two crucial
ways: It damages tumors’ cells and
it makes the tumors more vulnerable to radiation and chemotherapy.
“We
can deliver 30 times more drug to a tumor like this than you can with just
the free drug itself,” he says.
The
Duke team is turning up the heat on some of the most stubborn cancers:
breast, melanoma, cervical and ovarian.
They’re designing and developing intricate heating systems as they
go. In the next several months,
they’ll be able to use new equipment to heat up entire bodies in people
whose cancer has spread.
Once
this study is over, the next step is to get heat therapy approved by the
FDA and on the market. That will
probably take a few years. But the
goal, says Dewhirst, is to one day soon have heat actually being
“prescribed,” just like a drug.
“I
would hope we can have dramatic ant-tumor effects,” he says when asked if
heat can be a cure. “Whether or not
we can cure them is hard to know.”
But
for now, Wilson isn’t worried about a cure. She’s content to sit back and think warm – really warm –
thoughts.
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CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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