How Hyperthermia & Immunotherapy Work Together

For cancer vaccines to eliminate tumor cells from the patient’s body, there has to be a debulking, or reduction in the tumor burden. This is critical because many advanced cancer patients have more tumor cells than the killer cells can handle by themselves. The normal ways of reducing the burden are surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Unfortunately, these are all immunosuppressive, putting the killer cells at a disadvantage. Chemotherapy drugs mostly affect cells that reproduce rapidly by interfering with their DNA. Likewise, radiation causes breaks in DNA that trigger self-destruct when that cell tries to divide. These methods can be compared to trying to win a battle by bombing not just he enemy, but your own troops as well.

Hyperthermia, on the other hand, is an ideal debulking step because it increases killer cell efficiency. After all, the fever accompanying an infection is your body’s way of slowing the germ’s reproduction and increasing the speed and efficiency of the immune system cells. Hyperthermia and vaccine-primed killer cells make an ideal “one-two” punch for attacking cancer. The fever not only kills the tumor cells by shutting off their blood flow, it revs up the killer cells to their maximum potential.

How Vaccines work for Cancer

Most vaccines are for prevention, not for treating established disease. It is fairly easy to stimulate antibodies and other specific immunity against a foreign germ which may attack in the future. Cancer, however, involves “self” cells which have turned rogue, and the immune system has instructions to leave “self” cells alone. Without this protection, autoimmune diseases would be much more common. So, how do we stimulate the immune system to attack tumor cells?

One way is to remove tumor cells, kill them with radiation, and mix them with immune-stimulant chemicals. This mixture is then injected back into the body in the hopes that it will now be seen as foreign. As expected, this approach is complex, costly, and has limited effectiveness. Several other vaccine strategies have been tried, but Dendritic Cells (DC), hold tremendous potential as they can directly stimulate killer T cells without any assistance. We can grow millions of DC from a unit of whole blood, and each DC can activate up to 3,000 killer cells. Most tumor immunologists agree that a ratio of killer cells to tumor cells of at least 10: 1 is required for a complete response to vaccine treatment. To accomplish this, we must first remove at least half of the cancer cells in the body prior to the vaccine treatment. Unfortunately, radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy all degrade the killer cells, so another method must be used.

High Fever & Cancer

Most cases of spontaneous regression of cancer (when it disappears without treatment), have occurred after a fever in excess of 104 F. There is a range between 103.5 and 106 degrees F where tumor cells will die but normal tissue will survive. It’s not the heat that kills, it’s the difference in blood supply and metabolism, or how the two types of cells get energy from food and oxygen. Normal cells are organized with precise borders, like a neat suburban tract seen from the air. Power, gas, and clean water flow in, sewage flows out, and the systems work well because they are designed for the number of housing units.

Now look at a shantytown slum where the shacks are piled on top of each other, with a muddy ditch for water supply and sewage disposal. That’s a tumor colony, and because they don’t belong there, never signed a lease with management, and violate the zoning laws, the cells are always running a deficit for energy. Your cells have two ways to get the energy dollars called ATP to spend: clean and slow with oxygen, quick and dirty without it, resulting in lactic acid, which causes muscle soreness after hard exercise.
The rapid growth and poor supply of tumor cells means that their lactic acid buildup is higher, and the pH inside the cells is lower than normal cells

At high fevers, the part of the brain that regulates temperature called the hypothalamus shuts down nonessential supply girds to conserve oxygen to the brain, which cannot make lactic acid. Cancer cells are forced to choose: starve for energy and die, or make more lactic acid, which they cannot flush away, and they die from acid buildup. A hundred years ago a doctor in Baltimore named William Coley saw that cancer patients who had high fevers after surgery did better than those who did not. He used bacterial toxins to induce high fevers, and achieved a remarkable response rate: up to 45% of bone and breast cancer patients. This is superior to many chemotherapy drugs, but after the antibiotic revolution, his therapy faded into obscurity, although his toxins are still legally available through a clinic in Wisconsin.