Neuroendocrine Cancer – Intra Arterial – situated or occurring within, administered into, or involving entry by way of an artery.

The treatment of liver metastasis is a common approach following a metastatic diagnosis or discovery of liver metastasis downstream via re-staging. In addition to surgery, there are several liver directed therapies available via embolization techniques. This comes in several flavours:

1. Bland liver embolization – a minimally invasive technique which simply blocks the blood supply to the liver tumours in an attempt to reduce or kill those tumours. Sometimes called Hepatic Arterial Embolization or HAE.

2. Chemotherapy liver embolization – as above but adds in some cytotoxic chemo to the mix. Sometimes called Trans Arterial Chemo Embolization or TACE.

3. Radioembolization is a minimally invasive procedure that combines embolization and radiation therapy to treat liver cancer. Tiny glass or resin beads filled with the radioactive isotope yttrium Y-90 are placed inside the blood vessels that feed a tumour. Often known as Sirtex or SIR-Spheres.

Read my article on liver directed therapy including my own experience – click here

Liver therapy within the context of systemic therapy

Of course, systemic treatment is body-wide and so includes the liver as a target. Systemic treatment includes (but is not limited to) Lu177 (PRRT), Chemotherapy, Targeted Therapies such as Everolimus (Afinitor) and Sunitinib (Sutent). Also included are somatostatin analogues such as Lanreotide and Octreotide.

Sometimes systemic treatment is not fully effective on all metastases and although PRRT response rates are good, often patients still live with the burden of remnant liver tumours once therapy is finished.

Doctors in the Netherlands are looking at a trial using Lu177 (PRRT) as a liver directed therapy. The trial is based at 3 sites in the Netherlands and is titled: Intra-arterial Lutetium-177-dotatate for Treatment of Patients With Neuro-endocrine Tumor Liver Metastases (LUTIA). You can read more about the trial by clicking here.

In a clinical trial in USA, the NET Research Foundation is funding similar research at the UCSF Helen Diller Cancer Center led by Dr Tom Hope using Y90 intra-arterial for liver metastasis. See the NET RF’s information here and read more about the clinical trial by clicking here

And read this extract first published June 8, 2020, which I cite here: doi: 10.2967/jnumed.119.241273 J Nucl Med June 8, 2020 jnumed.119.241273

I will keep this article open for any updates.