• 6/29/2005
  • Scranton, PA
  • Jeff Sonderman
  • The Times Tribune

Cancer researchers are always fighting a battle on two fronts: finding treatments that work while limiting the debilitating side effects. Doctors at the Northeast Radiation Oncology Center in Dunmore are testing a method that may do both.

The new treatment ­— radioimmunotherapy — goes by the less tongue-tying nickname “liquid radiation.” It uses the body’s immune system to fight non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the sixth-most-common cancer in the United States.

About a half-dozen people in Northeastern Pennsylvania have gotten this treatment in the past six months at NROC, which was created in October 2003 as a partnership between four cancer doctors and Mercy Hospital in Scranton.

Clinical trials nationwide have shown that as many as eight of every 10 lymphoma patients are responsive to the treatment.

Liquid radiation uses tiny radioactive particles attached to antibodies that target cancerous cells.

When the antibody arrives, the particle then penetrates and kills that specific cancer cell, leaving other healthy cells undamaged.

This allows effective treatment with little or no pain or side effects.

“The problem with traditional chemotherapy is it gives you a lot of side effects,” said Chi K. Tsang, M.D., one of the four oncologists at the Northeast Radiation Oncology Center. “(Liquid radiation, however,) goes after where the cancer is, and only the cancer.”

Patients get several diagnostic scans before the treatment, and report for blood tests in the weeks or months afterward. The injection itself takes only about 10 minutes from an IV needle, said Harmar Brereton, M.D., another oncologist at NROC.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved it only for patients who have already tried conventional therapy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Eventually, however, the strategy of liquid radiation could be used to treat other types of cancer. The well-established cancer treatments, chemotherapy and radiation, also were developed first for lymphoma and then expanded to other cancers, Dr. Brereton said.

Researchers are trying to adapt liquid radiation for breast cancer and prostate cancer. “It is all experimental, but it is simply a matter of time,” Dr. Brereton said.