[Selective arterial chemo-embolization with microencapsulated anticancer drugs]

Selective arterial infusion of microencapsulated anticancer drugs has been introduced as an effective mode of targeted drug delivery system in cancer therapy. The potential therapeutic effect of this treatment comes from both the infraction and the sustained drug action, thus being described as CHEMOEMBOLIZATION. There is an increasing number of patients subjected to microcapsule therapy; during the recent 4 years, 285 patients with advanced carcinoma of the kidney, liver, urinary bladder, prostate and others including the GI tract, female genital organs, bone and lung were treated in 60 institutes of this country. Ninety percent of the patients received only single or duplicated infusion of the microcapsules with a mean dose of 21 mg. Of 211 measurable tumors, 74 (35%) showed a marked tumor reduction greater than 50%, 77 (37%) showed a moderate reduction less than 50% and 60 (28%) failed to respond. Intractable symptoms such as gross hemorrhage from the GU tract or severe pain were well controlled (75-81%). The remarkable antineoplastic effect of microcapsules often facilitated the radical surgery for highly invasive tumors and/or the organ preserving operation for locally invasive tumors. Additionally, a preoperative microcapsule therapy significantly improved 3 year survival rate of the patients with renal cell carcinoma, suggesting its usefulness as a preoperative adjuvant use. The results indicate that chemoembolization with microcapsules is an effective targeted cancer therapy for various organs.