HOW MAGNETIC HEATING TECHNOLOGY COULD BE A NEW CANCER-FIGHTING WEAPON
America's Mayo Clinic is testing Israeli technology that targets solid tumours with fast-rising heat in a process it calls hyperthermia
Anyone who has used an induction cooker is halfway to understanding Mayo Clinic's new experimental approach to killing cancer cells.
The health system, based in the US state of Minnesota, announced that it is the first in the US to test Israeli technology that targets solid tumours with fast-rising heat in a process it calls hyperthermia.
"Temperature is the Achilles' heel of cancer," says Dr Scott Lester, the Mayo radiation oncologist leading a clinical trial to see if the technology is safe.
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The challenge is in creating a therapy that focuses heat on cancer cells and does not damage the rest of the body. The company New Phase created a possible solution: to inject iron-containing nanoparticles that bind with cancer cells and make them identifiable targets for its magnetic-heating technology.
The encoded particles prevent overheating and keep the induced temperature at no more than 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).
Induction cookers can produce rapid heat and cause pots to quickly boil over, Lester says.
"We don't want to do that inside human beings," he says. "What we want is a controlled amount of heating."
Lester says this approach is novel, but doctors in Europe and Asia commonly use other forms of heat to treat cancer. Mayo's trial involves as many as 15 patients dealing with aggressive, end-stage cancers.
Two decades ago, Mayo radiation oncologists tried placing bags filled with hot water on the chests of women with breast cancer to augment the effects of operations or radiation treatments.
"There were times it was very successful," says Mayo's chairwoman of radiation oncology, Dr Nadia Laack, but oncologists abandoned the approach because the heat was irregular and sometimes painful.
Other approaches include placing people under heated blankets or in warm baths to raise their body temperatures. Doctors have also threaded needlelike probes directly into solid tumours to blast them with radio waves that create high heat.
Common treatment for solid tumours involves removing them through surgery, poisoning them with chemotherapy or radiation, or coaxing the immune system to identify and eliminate the tumours.
Mayo's key research questions are whether this magnetic-heating approach has an impact on cancer by itself or whether it works better in combination with existing treatments.
Mayo's study, funded by the Israeli company providing the technology, will focus on solid, stage-four tumours: those that have spread well beyond the organs or tissues where they originated.
Last month, the American Cancer Society announced a milestone: 70 per cent of Americans diagnosed with cancer from 2015 to 2021 survived five years or longer. But the survival odds dropped significantly when cancers had spread and reached stage four before diagnosis.
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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.
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2026-02-21T11:33:33Z
