In a new study, researchers discovered a treatment combination that strongly reduces tumor growth in liver cancer.
This discovery provides a potentially new way of treating one of the leading causes of cancer-related death worldwide.
The research was conducted by a team at the University of Missouri School of Medicine.
In the study, the team created an integrative therapy that combined minimally invasive radiofrequency ablation (RFA) with the chemotherapy drug sunitinib.
Individually, each treatment has a modest effect on the treatment of liver cancer.
The team hypothesized that pairing the two treatments would have a profound effect by activating an immune response to target and destroy liver cancer cells.
That’s exactly what their research revealed.
The team tested this approach by dividing the mice into four groups: a control group, a group that received only sunitinib, a group that received only RFA, and a group that received both RFA and sunitinib.
The researchers monitored tumor progression in each mouse via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) over 10 weeks.
They discovered the mice receiving combination therapy experienced much-slowed tumor growth. The life span of the mice in the combination therapy group was much longer than all of the other groups.
These results show that the sunitinib and RFA-integrated therapy functions as an effective treatment that is superior to each individual therapy, strongly suppressing tumor growth and extending the lifetime.
The team plans to expand their research to study the effectiveness of this combination therapy on companion dogs and eventually on humans.
One author of the study is Guangfu Li, Ph.D., DVM.
The study is published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer.
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