New Treatment Prolongs Life for Melanoma Sufferers

A Phase II investigation has revealed that a new treatment for melanoma sufferers could considerably prolong the time patients can live without the disease advancing.

Normally once melanoma of the eye spreads to the liver, which is very common, treatments become ineffective and often the patient dies within two to four months on average. One in ten will survive for a year after this happens.

James Pingpank, associate professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, plans to reveal to the 2011 European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress, that by April of next year, patients who had been randomly selected to receive the new treatment would survive an average of 8.1 months longer without the disease spreading to their liver. This is much longer than the average 1.6 months that patients receiving an alternate form of care would have.

The new treatment is called hepatic perfusion (PHP) and it is designed to soak the liver with high levels of chemotherapy without affecting the rest of the body. It takes approximately 30 minutes for the drug Melphalan to be infused into the liver with an intra-arterial catheter. The blood in the veins coming out of the liver is then caught and filtered through a specially designed double-balloon catheter and will obtain the drug before the cleaned blood is returned to the body. This way the medication is directly transferred to the liver. Once this procedure is done the patient will be observed carefully prior to being returned home. Once the patient has recuperated they will repeat the process approximately every four to eight weeks.

Participants in the group had an overall progression-free survival time of around six months, compared to the 1.6 months of the other patients who did not receive the treatment.

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