Professor Agata Mikolajczyk-Martinez | Dehydration, Heat and Chemotherapy Could Offer a Knockout Punch for Peritoneal Cancer

Professor Agata Mikolajczyk-Martinez of the Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences and her colleagues have explored an advanced treatment system that incorporates a third offensive arm: dehydration. Dehydrating the peritoneal cavity using a hairdryer-style attachment on a medical device could enhance the effects of the heated chemotherapy treatment.

Professor Mikolajczyk-Martinez and her colleagues tested the approach using colorectal cancer cells in well plates. They introduced chemotherapy drugs into the liquid that was bathing the cells, and incubated the well plates at 37 degrees. The team then tested partial dehydration by removing the liquid and allowing the cells to dry out a little over 30 minutes at 45 degrees.

They tested different chemotherapy drugs, including oxaliplatin and doxorubicin, and also investigated whether the order in which the treatments were delivered affected the outcome.

The team found that cells subjected to dehydration alone had a viability of 65%; oxaliplatin alone resulted in 61% viability; and oxaliplatin plus dehydration plus heating resulted in 60% viability. Strikingly, by reversing the order of the treatments so that the cells experienced dehydration and heating before oxaliplatin treatment, the viability was reduced to 48%.

When the researchers repeated the experiments with multiple rounds of treatment to mimic what might occur in a human patient, the triple therapy proved to be far more effective than any of the individual treatments. Interestingly, cells that had been subjected to dehydration appeared to absorb more of the chemotherapy drugs, which may underlie the synergistic effects of triple therapy.

The team’s results suggest that including dehydration in the cancer treatment protocol could help to enhance treatment effectiveness. Their discoveries could pave the way for more effective treatments for peritoneal metastasis.