Halifax doctor shocked by success of using heat to force cancer cell death

CITYnews halifax / By Natasha O’Neill

There could be another option to treat cancer in the future, after a human trial proved to be extremely successful by raising the temperature of a tumour to kill it off.

Dr. Camen Giacomantonio, the chief medical officer for Halifax-based Sona Nanotech, used the idea that a fever helps kick-start the body’s immune system by raising its core temperature. He told The Todd Veinotte Show that when people get fevers, they get rid of them, but what’s happening is the immune system is becoming active.

“We’ve capitalized on an evolutionary benefit that humans have…The immune system, the one you were born with,” Giacomantonio said.

A person’s immune system will start attacking foreign cells, and the effect is “very powerful,” he said. Some doctors have noted that when treating cancer patients, those who get sick with an infection, their cancer can go away. This idea intrigued Giacomantonio, who also learned how a doctor over a century ago would infect people to create a fever to get rid of cancer.

Although this idea worked, it also made the people very sick.

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“We in my lab sought to introduce fever into the core of a tumour,” he explained.

To do this, he worked with Sona Nanotech, which makes gold nanorods that are made without toxins. Using a needle, these rods can be inserted into the tumour and heated up with a near-infrared light, similar to the light found in laser pointers.

“The energy from that light, when shone on tumours containing these particles, is converted into heat. And so we can control that heat very precisely,” Giacomantonio said.

The beauty of this kind of treatment is that, unlike radiation, which is toxic and causes tissue damage, it can be done in an outpatient clinic.

“What happens in cancer cells is that stress heat makes a cancer cell go into a death cycle,” he said. “That’s what’s broken in a cancer cell is the ability to die.”

By prompting these cells to die, the body’s immune system can then go in and clean up the dead cells. In theory, the treatment can be used in all cancers, but the first trial happened on patients with melanoma, which Giacomantonio sees the most in his practice.

The trial that took place saw 10 people treated, and eight of whom saw results within the first two weeks, and six of those who were cleared.

“An 80 per cent response rate is was far better than we’d ever hoped for, but to have these things cleared within two weeks was just shocking,” he said. “We were over the moon about it.”

The trial took place in Santiago, Chile, because the costs to manufacture the gold particles would have been far higher in North America. However, Giacomantonio said the ethics committee in Nova Scotia approved the project and oversaw the results.

The next step in this research is to conduct another study, but this time in the province. It will focus on what works and doesn’t, and why.