Star Wars Technology Targets Tumors

Cheung Laboratories, Inc. (CLI: Columbia, MD), has incorporated an adaptive phased array (APA) technology into the Microfocus 1000™, a product designed to eradicate cancerous tumors with deep, focused heat. The principal advantage of APA-based heating is that the clinician can focus microwave energy on a tumor and avoid creating "hot spots" in normal, healthy tissue by canceling or "damping" micro-wave radiation. APA microwave techniques were designed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (Lexington, MA) by BMDO's predecessor, the Strategic Defense Initiative. Originally developed to counter clutter and defeat countermeasures associated with an incoming missile, it is the latest Star Wars technology to be drafted into the war against cancer.

In September 1997, CLI received a premarket approval ruling from the FDA to incorporate APA into its prior-approved Microfocus 1000 device, making it immediately available for commercialization. CLI entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with MIT for the commercialization rights of the patented APA technology. CLI is targeting breast cancer as a first line of marketing, and plans to move on to prostate tumors as well as generally inoperable, deep tumors.

APA technology gives doctors a new level of control in the heat treatment (hyperthermia) of tumors. The idea of treating disease with heat is as old as Hippocrates. In the case of cancerous tumors, heat combined with either radiation or chemotherapy doubles the tumor response rate compared with radiation or chemotherapy alone. But, conventional methods are not effective in heating tumors inside the body without burning the skin or surrounding healthy tissue. APA-focused heating uniquely heats deep inside the body without burning elsewhere; it also increases accuracy and can support novel therapies, such as a liposome-based drug delivery system that CLI is currently developing. By encapsulating toxic anticancer agents in a liposome, the drug can be delivered to the tumor site through the bloodstream and then released when targeted by focused heating. The heat melts the membrane of the liposome and releases the drug, concentrating the toxic effects of the drug at the site where it is most effective. Side effects would be theoretically minimal.

In vivo studies have been conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH; Boston, MA) by Dr. Gerald Wolf and have generally confirmed the efficacy of the focused heating regimen.