Heat of the moment

Last year was officially designated the year of radiotherapy, marking 100 years since Marie Curie won a second Nobel Prize for her work on radium.

Radiotherapy is still an important part of the armoury in the fight against cancer, but in the past decade or so other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum have been exploited for the purpose of treating tumours, offering certain benefits. For a start, one of the central paradoxes and problems of radiotherapy is that, while the radiation does a good job of killing malignant cells by damaging their DNA, it can also cause new, secondary tumours through the build-up of genetic errors in healthy cells.

By contrast, newer techniques use lower frequencies to essentially heat cancer cells locally to a temperature that is cytotoxic - a phenomenon termed thermal ablation.

‘All medical devices ultimately are driven by a medical need, and understanding the medical need really creates a starting point for the science,’ said Stuart McIntyre, chief executive officer at Microsulis Medical, a specialist in thermal ablation.