Doctors use chemo bath to treat cancer

McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE

MELVILLE, N.Y. — Long Island cancer doctors have borrowed a page from medicine’s past to write a new chapter on how to address a rare malignancy by infusing heated chemotherapy directly into the abdomen using a heart-lung machine.

The treatment is being tested at Stony Brook University Medical Center as a therapy for cancer of the appendix, a malignancy so rare it is known as an orphan cancer. The American Cancer Society has no statistics on its prevalence.

Dr. Colette Pameijer, a Stony Brook cancer surgeon and researcher, is treating appendiceal cancer with heated chemotherapy in what she interchangeably calls a chemo bath or, more technically, intraperitoneal hyperthermic chemoperfusion.

By warming the cancer drug, mitomycin, to about 107 degrees, it becomes a heated anti-cancer weapon when pumped through a catheter directly into the abdomen after surgery. The chemo bath is performed only once.

“We believe that in addition to the chemotherapy, the heat is directly toxic to the tumor cells,” Pameijer said. She added the concept of a chemo bath for cancer of the appendix was first broached about 20 years ago by Dr. Paul Sugarbaker, a Washington cancer specialist and theorist.