CME Webcast featuring Dr. Poon on Recent Advances in Management of Hepatocellular Carcinoma
Conditions
ThermoDox®, heat-activated liposome therapy
Celsion's lead indication is Primary Liver Cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma, or HCC).
In hepatocellular carcinoma
Primary liver cancer is one of the most common and deadly forms of cancer. It is estimated that up to 90% of liver cancer patients will die within five years of diagnosis. The incidence of primary liver cancer (approximately 20,000 new cases per year) is relatively low in the U.S. However, due to the prevalence of Hepatitis B and C, conditions which may predispose individuals to liver cancer, in developing countries, there are approximately 660,000 new cases per year worldwide. With the inclusion of liver metastases from other cancers (e.g. colon, lung, breast etc.), the total number of cases of liver cancer increases significantly.
Although the standard treatment for liver cancer is surgical resection of the tumor, 80% to 90% of patients are ineligible for surgery. Early stage liver cancer generally has few symptoms, so detection and diagnosis are often delayed. When finally detected and diagnosed, the tumor is often too large for surgery. There are few alternative treatments, since radiation therapy and chemotherapy are largely ineffective.
Clinical trials with ThermoDox® for the treatment of HCC are currently underway using radio frequency ablation (RFA) as a heat source to both activate ThermoDox and ablate tumor cells.
In recurrent chest wall breast cancer (RCW)
Since its inception, Celsion has been actively seeking a targeted localized treatment for breast cancer. This condition, which afflicts patients that have previously undergone a mastectomy (surgery to remove a cancerous breast), occurs in about 15,000 patients annually in the United States. There is currently no effective therapeutic approach for this condition, and many of these patients die within two years of the recurrence of the breast cancer.
Occasionally RCW can be referred to by several different terms. Some of these include inflammatory breast disease, inflammatory breast cancer, chest wall breast cancer, local-regional recurrence, chest wall recurrence.
In RCW the heat source is a device which is designed to heat the target tissue to a temperature adequate to activate ThermoDox but not to ablate the tissue - as occurs when RFA is used as a heat source.