Karmanos center makes new device available for at-home treatment of liver cancer
Detroit — The Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute on Wednesday announced that it is the first institute in the world to prescribe a new special kind of treatment for advanced liver cancer at home using electromagnetic waves.
Called the “TheraBionic P1,” the device works via a small spoon-shaped antenna the patient places on their tongue, said co-inventor Dr. Boris Pasche at a news conference Wednesday.
“By holding the spoon in the mouth, the patient becomes an ‘antenna’ and receives the treatment throughout the body, so it treats the primary tumor and as well as well as the metastasis,” Pasche said.
He said the device has the ability to treat a patient’s primary tumor and spreading of cancer throughout their body. The electromagnetic treatment, which two Karmanos patients have already been prescribed, is intended to block tumor growth without affecting healthy tissue, according to a news release.
The FDA approved the device for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common kind of liver cancer, in September 2023. The treatment is available to patients for whom first- and second-line cancer therapies have not been effective. Patients use it for an hour at a time, three times each day.
The device is appealing because of its ease of use, said Dr. Anthony Shields, a member of Karmanos’ gastrointestinal and neuroendocrine oncology team.
“I often think about my patients in the past who would have benefited in having more time with their loved ones if this device was available, which is why I am excited we can prescribe it to patients,” said Shields. “As oncologists who treat gastrointestinal cancers, we often face some of the most incurable diseases. Our team is excited to be able to offer our patients another option in the fight, which is why patients come to Karmanos.”
The treatment it provides can prolong patients’ lives if it stabilizes the cancer — it also has the potential to shrink tumors — he told The Detroit News. It’s not expected to cure the disease, though.
Eveline Perrier’s husband, Robert, used TheraBionic P1 therapy to treat advanced hepatocellular carcinoma. He used the P1 device in September 2011 while also doing oral chemotherapy, but his doctor discontinued the chemo two years later due to side effects. From then until he died in 2017, he only received treatments from the P1 device, living nearly six years post-diagnosis. He passed away from kidney failure after declining dialysis following complications from a hip fracture.
The TheraBionic device “provided my husband several additional years of life,” said Eveline in a press release. “I hope that other patients will be able to benefit from the device in the future.”
Shields said the FDA looks for in new treatments include effectiveness, whether they improve on current standards of care and possible side effects of the treatment.
“As long as you make the disease stable, and you don’t decrease the quality of life — unfortunately, much of my chemotherapy does — then they can have a prolonged quality of life,” Shields said.
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