By Ofer Shalev

In clinical practice, most patients with advanced cancer receive chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immunotherapy, or targeted biological treatments. Over time, many of these treatments lose effectiveness as cancer cells adapt or develop resistance. In response, oncologists often switch to a new line of therapy, which can introduce additional, sometimes cumulative, side effects.

There are limited options that can be effective in these cases and prevent further progression of the cancer that will ultimately lead to the patient’s death. In many cases, clinicians cannot determine whether a treatment is working until weeks or months after it begins. Published data show that the mortality rate due to cancer is unfortunately still very high, and the number of deaths caused by cancer is increasing each year.
These limitations highlight the need for alternative treatment approaches, particularly those that remain effective even as tumors evolve, while minimizing toxicity and preserving quality of life. Furthermore, there is a significant financial aspect, both at the individual and health system levels, to using an appropriate therapy with higher efficacy.

Our team set out to develop a treatment approach using magnetic nanoparticles (NPs) – small, engineered particles that circulate throughout the body and preferentially accumulate in tumor tissue. When activated by an external energy source, such as non-ionizing magnetic radiation, the NPs generate localized heat to damage cancer cells while leaving surrounding healthy tissue unaffected.

When applying a technology for the systemic treatment of advanced cancer that uses paramagnetic NPs and magnetic hyperthermia, we can kill cancer cells and prevent the development of resistance, because heat-based approaches are generally considered less prone to the resistance mechanisms seen with many drug therapies. This new treatment can be repeated as needed, given the cancer cells' lack of resistance to heat and the technology's very low toxicity, as previously demonstrated in preclinical studies, and now with humans.

One of the defining challenges of this work was what is often called bio-convergence – the need to integrate expertise across multiple scientific and engineering disciplines into a single therapeutic system. Unlike conventional oncology treatments, which are primarily based on pharmacology or biology alone, magnetic hyperthermia, a field of interventional oncology, requires the successful convergence of chemistry, physics, biology, imaging science, and medical engineering.

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