A NEW treatment for liver cancer that isolates the organ and “bathes” it in chemotherapy has been found to be effective in almost 90 per cent of patients.

The procedure, pioneered at University Hospital Southampton, involves using two small balloons to divert blood past the liver for an hour while delivering drugs directly into the organ.

Currently, 100 patients whose cancer had spread to the liver have been treated. 

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Consultant interventional radiologist Dr Brian Stedman has described the treatment as a "landmark moment."

Known as chemosaturation therapy, the technique allows doctors to administer much larger doses of drug than patients would receive with standard chemotherapy as it does not enter the bloodstream and cause unnecessary damage to healthy parts of the body.

Once the drug has been delivered, blood from the liver is drained from the patient and processed through a filtration machine to reduce toxicity before being returned to the patient via the jugular vein.

Dr Stedman, who is co-founder of PLANETS cancer charity which has helped fund the research, said: “When we first trialled this treatment on two patients in 2012 I said that the development would be a landmark moment in cancer care and it really has proved to be, given these results.

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“The outlook for patients specifically suffering from cancer which has spread to the liver has been notoriously poor because the effect of standard chemotherapy is limited by the unwanted damage the drug causes to the rest of the body.

"With such a large series of results, it also proves the safety of the system, with patients feeling back to normal within days and maintaining an excellent quality of life during treatment by avoiding many of the unwanted side-effects of standard chemotherapy."

A spokesman for PLANETS said the average length of survival in those studied was 15 months but in some cases, ongoing cycles of chemosaturation therapy have almost removed patients’ cancers completely.

Study co-author Neil Pearce said: "While we currently only have evidence for this treatment in liver cancer which has spread from the eye, these results may open the door for other difficult-to-treat cancers affecting the liver.

"These findings show there is real potential for this treatment to extend to more common cancers, which is very exciting."