Low-intensity electromagnetic fields much weaker than those produced by a mobile phone helped reduce tumor size and prolong life for a small number of patients with advanced liver cancer, an international group of scientists has determined.
The FDA has subsequently granted permission to test larger groups of patients, the British newspaper The Guardian reports. The leader of the research effort is seeking funding from companies in the U.S. and around the world to support future research, the paper said. Details of the initial findings can be found in the British Journal of Cancer.
Let's take stock of this: Certainly, far more research is necessary before this treatment becomes viable, and further trials will take time to fund and launch. But the idea of using electromagnetic fields to treat cancer is a tantalizing one because it could boost other treatments or potentially serve as a safe alternative to chemotherapy, and not cost quite so much. FierceDrugDelivery has previously reported that electromagnetic fields have been tested in early drug delivery research, but their use to treat cancer appears pretty new.
"This is truly a novel technique," lead researcher Boris Pasche of the University of Alabama in Birmingham said, as reported by The Guardian. And here's where the idea of electromagnetic fields as a safe cancer treatment is compelling: Pasche noted that the fields used in the study were between 100 and 1,000 times weaker than those generated by a cellular phone. Some believe that too much exposure to the magnetic field generated by cell phones could cause cancer. Though the industry argues, of course, that the data proves they're safe.
Pasche and scientists from the U.S., Brazil, France and Switzerland tested patients with advanced liver cancer. The subjects held a spoon-shaped antenna in their mouths so researchers could deliver a "very-low-intensity" electromagnetic field to their bodies three times a day. Keep in mind that the treatment didn't work in everyone. But a small number of patients saw their tumors shrink, and the surrounding healthy tissue was undamaged.
How did this work? This study was inconclusive, but a previous experiment conducted by the same group using cancer cell cultures suggested that low-level electromagnetic fields may hamper cancer cells' ability to grow and multiply, The Guardian notes.
The latest study also builds on a 2009 effort, in which Pasche and the others found that low-level electromagnetic fields at specific frequencies stopped cancer cell growth in some patients.
- read The Guardian article
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