Chemo Bath The Successful Cancer Treatment

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As there isn’t a cure for cancer, and as mesothelioma is a particularly aggressive form of the disease, patients and their physicians regularly try a variety of approaches to treat the symptoms and slow the spread of the cancer. One of the latest approaches to treating cancer – a “chemo bath” – has proven successful in the United Kingdom.

Previously tried in the United States, a chemo bath is a procedure during which a physician saturates the affected body region with heated chemotherapy. The process in the UK involved liver cancer patients; in the United States, oncologists have used the approach to treat peritoneal mesothelioma and other cancers.

In medical terms, a chemo bath is called Chemosaturation with Percutaneous Hepatic Perfusion (CS-PHP).  The UK researchers used CS-PHP to treat patients with advanced cancer of the liver.

Physicians at the University of Pittsburgh, which are known for their treatment of mesothelioma patients, often use a similar approach – hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemoperfusion (HIPEC) – to treat mesothelioma. As with CS-PHP, that approach involves concentrating chemotherapy doses on the affected area while avoiding the rest of the body.

HIPEC involves bathing the patient’s abdomen with heated high-dose chemotherapy drugs with the aim of reaching the several tumors that lie in the abdominal cavity. Such an approach, according to University of Pittsburgh researchers, helps mesothelioma patients live up to three or four years longer than they would have otherwise.

CS-PHP, however, helped patients live five times longer than those undergoing the best alternative; such an accomplishment could make it more effective than the HIPEC approach. CS-PHP isolates treatment to the affected area, then filters the chemotherapy away from the rest of the patient’s body.

“To cut off an organ from the body for 60 minutes, soak it in a high dose of drug and then filter the blood almost completely clean before returning is truly groundbreaking,” said Brian Stedman, who performed the CS-PHP procedure in the UK. Stedman added that this treatment could also be useful in treating other malignancies, such as breast and colon cancer.

A Revolutionary Approach to Cancer Care

CS-PHP treats liver cancer by infusing chemotherapy into the bloodstream, sending it through the liver, then filtering it out of the patient’s bloodstream. Such an approach allows higher doses of chemo to be applied more directly to the affected area.

Such an approach also overcomes one of chemotherapy’s traditional limitations. Current chemotherapy applications are limited because they attack the entire body indiscriminately; that means they attack healthy cells as well as malignant ones.

Oncologists and mesothelioma patients regularly try experimental approaches to treatment because traditional treatments tend to do little to stymie the growth and spread of mesothelioma. Though not tested on mesothelioma patients as of yet, CS-PHP could one day be a complimentary treatment for mesothelioma. Physicians often use gene therapy and immunotherapy in concert with chemotherapy and other palliative care options in treating mesothelioma.