Sharp Memorial Hospital is the first hospital system in San Diego to use a revolutionary technology to destroy cancerous tumors.
The groundbreaking treatment, called histotripsy, focuses external beams of ultrasound into the body to kill the cancerous tissue without ever breaking the skin. The treatment will initially target liver tumors before being tested for use on kidney and pancreatic tumors, according to Hamed Aryafar, M.D., said.
“This was cow liver that’s completely liquified, nothing left of the actual tissue,” Aryafar said. “No incisions, no needles, it focuses beams of ultrasound into the body and it can disrupt the tissue.”
Dr. Hamed Aryafar said this cutting-edge technology is designed to target tumors that are not responding to traditional chemotherapies or other forms of medicine.
“This is very exciting, for the first time, I can sit in clinic, talk to a patient, tell them that they have liver cancer but we have a solution for them,” Dr. Aryafar said.
This new tool uses a robotic arm and very advanced software to aim high-powered ultrasound at the cancerous tissue.
Using a tiny piece of cow liver in place of a human one, they showed NBC 7’s Jeanette Quezada how it works.
“We kill the tumor plus a little margin around the tumor to make sure there are no cancer cells we missed or anything that could potentially survive,” Dr. Aryafar said.
Once the cancerous tissue is destroyed, Dr. Aryafar said the body will treat it as any dead tissue and get rid of it.
“That tumor stops acting like a tumor, it does no longer get blood supply, and it slowly becomes a big hole where it was and over time that hole collapses down and disappears and the liver sort of just reforms that part of the liver,” he said.
He said the hope is that the body’s immune system will recognize the dead cancerous tissue and use it as antigens to treat other tumors that may be in the body.
Using a model, they also showed a demo of what the procedure would be like when done on a patient.
“This is a whole change in paradigm because up until now, we either had medicines that work on cancers or everything else is surgical with incisions and cutting and this is the first time that we can kill cancer without opening the body at all,” Dr. Aryafar said.
Dr. Aryafar said there is a minor chance of having infection or bleeding, but the risk of that happening is much lower than breaking into the skin.
“A lot of these patients we expect to be able to send home the same day and they can get up and walk around with no band-aids. It looks like they’ve never had anything done. The liver cancer is gone,” Dr. Aryafar said.
The first patient is scheduled to undergo this new treatment next week.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the use of this technology for liver tumors.
Although the first stage is with the liver, Dr. Aryafar said they’re hoping for a stage rollout to treat other types of cancer.
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