Some women at a high risk for breast cancer choose to have a mastectomy rather than face the possibility of developing the disease. A new technology could offer an alternative to this radical solution.
Celsion Corporation, based in Columbia, Maryland, developed a method of using focused heat to target microwaves that seek out and kill tumors and precancerous cells without damaging surrounding healthy tissue and skin.
The microwaves are attracted to the water found in tumors. Normal breast tissue is made up almost entirely of fatty tissue, which doesn't contain water, so the device actively seeks out and sterilizes only the cancerous cells.
"What Celsion is doing is using a technology with microwaves deep in the breast tissue to sterilize the tumor nodule," said Paul Stauffer, medical physicist in radiation oncology at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine. "The hope at this point is that this will prove to equal the results with lumpectomy and mastectomy or even do better."
Celsion's system received Food and Drug Administration clearance as an adjunct to radiation therapy in September 1997. Now, the company wants to prove that the system can handle tumors on its own.
Last year, preclinical studies at Massachusetts General Hospital of Boston and in England showed that the focused-heat technology can heat a tumor by as much as 78 degrees without damaging skin or surrounding healthy tissue. At this temperature, the system can kill an entire tumor and any cancer cells in its vicinity in between eight and 10 minutes.
"With this procedure, we will compress the breast, fix it in place, [and] as in a mammography, provide heat from both sides, use a very sophisticated design for the microwave to be focused at the tumor and nothing else," said Augustine Cheung, chief scientific officer and founder of Celsion. "There's no burning, no blistering."
