Baptist Medical Center Downtown Interventional Radiologists Offering New Treatment for Liver Cancer
Only Medical Center in Jacksonville to Offer Selective Internal Radiation Therapy

Jacksonville, Florida, May 4, 2006 -- Interventional radiologists and radiation oncologists at Baptist Medical Center Downtown are offering a new regional radiation treatment for liver cancer called Selective Internal Radiation Therapy (SIRT). Since Baptist is the only medical center in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia to offer this therapy, patients have come from throughout the region for care.

Use of SIRT is indicated for cancer patients who have tumors involving the liver and who are not candidates for surgery. The most common patients referred for the procedure have had colorectal cancer or hepatocellular cancer (a rare consequence of chronic hepatitis infection).

Rather than external beam radiation, SIRT uses Sir-Sphere® radiation particles, which are resin beads embedded with yttrium-90, a beta-emitting radiation particle that only penetrates a few millimeters around where it is placed. The particles are implanted into the hepatic artery via a small catheter placed by the interventional radiologist using a syringe, enabling a radiation concentration around the tumors of 50 to 100 times the amount which can safely be delivered by conventional external beam radiation.

"The danger of damage to normal tissue is low because tumors in the liver derive their blood flow mainly from the hepatic artery, whereas the normal liver derives its blood source mainly from the portal vein," explains interventional radiologist Timothy Daniel, MD. "When we deliver radiation particles through the hepatic artery, they go almost exclusively to the tumors."

SIRT is considered palliative and has been shown to prolong life when combined with standard chemotherapy. "The high concentration of radiation that SIRT delivers to the tumors can render a PET-positive (aggressively growing) tumor into a tumor with minimal metabolic activity," says Daniel. "It makes the tumors inactive."

Preparation and treatment is accomplished in three outpatient visits to the Interventional Radiology Lab at Baptist.

"The SIRT program offers a unique and effective new tool for the management of selected patients whose cancers have spread to the liver," says radiation oncologist Douglas Johnson, MD . "In most cases, these patients are inoperable, and, in years past, the main option available was chemoembolization, a procedure which caused a great deal of toxicity and frequently required hospitalization. The new outpatient SIRT technique delivers very focal radiation treatment to the liver, with little radiation to the rest of the body, and is much more easily tolerated. In addition, early survival evidence suggests that it is superior to chemoembolization."

"The results of this new treatment are impressive," says Daniel. "Our goals are to significantly reduce the tumor size, prolong life and increase the quality of life. We have achieved those goals in virtually every case we have done."