“New out-of-body operation saves cancer patient” was the headline in The Times, UK (19 December 2002). At the San Metteo Hospital in Pavia, Italy, surgeons treated a man who had metastatic cancer in his liver by removing the organ, treating it with radiotherapy, and then re-implanting it. The operation carried out late in 2001 took 21 hours. One year on, the patient is alive and well with no signs of tumour recurrence, so the surgeons are now planning to treat six more patients who have multiple liver tumours that are resistant to chemotherapy and would not benefit from conventional radiotherapy, reported the New Scientist (18 December 2002).
The team used boron neutron capture therapy — a technique developed in the 1950s that has proved difficult to use because the neutron beam is easily blocked from reaching the tumour by obstructions such as bones, and because of toxicity to normal tissues. “By explanting the organ, we could give a high and uniform dose to all the liver, which is impossible to obtain inside the body without serious risk to the patient,” says Tazio Pinelli, a physicist who worked with the liver surgeon Aris Zonta. This technique could one day be used to treat tumours in other organs that can be transplanted, such as the pancreas or lungs. Boron neutron capture therapy is also currently in Phase I trials for untreatable brain tumours — “obviously without removing the organ in question”, says the New Scientist.
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