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.