'Targeted Chemo' Safely Shrinks Liver Tumors

Feb. 4, 2009— -- Linda Campbell had already beaten ocular melanoma, a rare form of skin cancer, or so she thought. Then during the summer, doctors discovered the tumors had spread to her liver.

"There were so many they couldn't count them," said Campbell.

Campbell, who's 59 years old and lives with her husband outside of Lexington, N.C., learned that when cancer spreads to the liver, it becomes much more deadly.

It does not matter whether cancer starts in the breast or colon, lung or skin, the real damage is caused when it metastasizes to the liver. Every year an estimated 200,000 Americans receive the grim diagnosis and few patients survive more than a year.

"There was a lot of crying. ... And we weren't sure what to do," Campbell told ABC News.

Doctors suggested Campbell enroll in a clinical trial testing a new, radically different type of chemotherapy. This experimental technique targets only the cancer site, allowing doctors to flood the liver with 10 times the dose of a standard chemotherapy drug.

"You can perhaps get a better effectiveness, which would improve the longevity of the patient and the quality of life," said Dr. H. Richard Alexander of the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, Md., one of several now conducting clinical trials on this technique.

"Anytime you get a dose of chemo intravenously, even a teaspoon, it's going to be distributed through the entire body," Alexander said. "You are only going to get a drop or a fraction of a drop into the tumor where you really want it. But if you can direct a teaspoon of chemotherapy to a region of the body where the cancer is actively growing, then you are going to get a much higher dose of that potentially effective chemotherapy directly to the tumor."

The challenge: how to do it safely. Now, doctors say they've found a way.

In this protocol, doctors thread a catheter up to the liver and for the next 30 minutes inject the high doses of the chemotherapy drug directly to the site. To prevent the drug from reaching the rest of the body, doctors "capture" the blood -- now loaded with the chemo drug -- as it leaves the liver. The blood is passed through an external filter then safely returned to the body.