Blood purification therapy in cancer treatment

It is well known that cancer patients have specific and nonspecific immunosuppressive substances in their sera that depress cellular immunity. Plasma exchanges have been attempted to remove these immunosuppressive factors and improve the immunity to cancer. Double infiltration plasmapheresis has also been attempted and has been found to remove the immunosuppressive substances efficiently without a large volume substitution. Using these methods, an improvement in performance status and clinical symptoms and reduction of tumor size have been observed. Cancer chemotherapy has several severe side effects. Double filtration plasmapheresis is also clinically applied as a surplus carcinostatic drug adsorption method to alleviate systemic adverse reactions.