Adjuvant electrochemotherapy in veterinary patients: a model for the planning of future therapies in humans

Enrico P Spugnini,Alfonso Baldi,Gennaro Citro

doi:10.1186/1756-9966-28-114

Abstract

The treatment of soft tissue tumors needs the coordinated adoption of surgery with radiation therapy and eventually, chemotherapy. The radiation therapy (delivered with a linear accelerator) can be preoperative, intraoperative, or postoperative. In selected patients adjuvant brachytherapy can be adopted. The goal of these associations is to achieve tumor control while maximally preserving the normal tissues from side effects. Unfortunately, the occurrence of local and distant complications is still elevated. Electrochemotherapy is a novel technique that combines the administration of anticancer agents to the application of permeabilizing pulses in order to increase the uptake of antitumor molecules. While its use in humans is still confined to the treatment of cutaneous neoplasms or the palliation of skin tumor metastases, in veterinary oncology this approach is rapidly becoming a primary treatment. This review summarizes the recent progresses in preclinical oncology and their possible transfer to humans.

Highlights

Achieving local tumor control in cancer patients is one of the primary tasks of oncologists and is frequently cause of serious concerns
Due to the advanced stage at the time of diagnosis, cancer is preferentially treated with multi-modality therapies. These combinations have been tested through multi-institutional phase II and III trials and usually consist of the association of surgery and radiation therapy [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Chemotherapy is usually confined to an adjuvant role for those cancers with high tendency to metastasize or is perfusionally administered in combination with hyperthermia for advanced disease [7,8,9,10]

Summary

Introduction

Achieving local tumor control in cancer patients is one of the primary tasks of oncologists and is frequently cause of serious concerns. Electrochemotherapy A new cancer treatment that can achieve high rates of remission without the associated problems of high financial and biological cost of previous procedures has been explored over the past 15 years and called electrochemotherapy (ECT) It combines the administration of chemotherapy drugs with the application of permeabilizing pulses having appropriate waveform in order to enhance the captation of antitumor molecules by tumor cells. A similar study in 22 dogs with soft tissue sarcomas, preferentially treated with a postoperative protocol, yielded a median time to recurrence of 730 days with a 95% response rate, and again hemangiopericytoma showed to be extremely sensitive to ECT, data confirmed by results obtained in cats as well [27,39].

Conclusion

Findings

Strohbehn JW