Return to Main Menu

New delivery system used to administer radiation MUSC's Hollings Cancer Center will be among the first 30 institutions in the country to treat a breast cancer patient with radiation administered through a balloon catheter directly to the surgical site where the cancerous lump was removed.  The therapy minimizes radiation exposure to healthy tissue, and the course of treatment is five days as opposed to six to seven weeks with the standard treatment method. The process uses a new medical device, the MammoSite Radiation Therapy System (RTS), which received U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance on May 6. Drs. William Gillanders, from left, Joseph M. Jenrette, and David Cole with Jessica Durham. Durham chose the new procedure to avoid the side effects of conventional radiation therapy. On Monday, May 20, MUSC surgeons David Cole, M.D., and William Gillanders, M.D., removed cancerous tissue from 25-year-old Jessica Durham of Smoaks.  The two surgeons, with the assistance of Joseph M.  Jenrette III, M.D., radiation oncologist, implanted the RTS, an inflatable balloon attached to a hollow catheter, at the site where the lump was removed. They inflated the balloon with saline solution and contrast media so the balloon could be imaged. Next week, Jenrette will administer radiation through the catheter directly into the inflated balloon. This is accomplished with a brachytherapy machine which sends a pellet of radiation directly to the center of the balloon, delivering a prescribed level of radiation to the tissue surrounding the original tumor. The pellet is left in for five minutes and then removed.  Jenrette will treat Durham in this manner on an out-patient basis twice a day for five days. Each treatment lasts five minutes.  It  is an alternative to external beam radiation where the entire breast is irradiated. “With the new brachytherapy application, the radiation is mostly confined to the cavity where the cancer generally would come back,” said Jenrette. “The surrounding healthy breast tissue is spared radiation damage, usually redness of entire breast and in some cases, radiation burns.” Candidates for the new treatment are usually women whose cancer is caught in early stages and whose tumors are under two and half centimeters and not too close to the skin or the chest wall. It offers an alternative to women considering the breast conserving lumpectomy which requires follow-up radiation treatment. Although breast conservation therapy allows a woman to save her breast, 50 percent of patients with early stage breast cancer still choose to have a mastectomy, despite comparable long-term recurrence and survival rates.  With this new radiation therapy option,  more women are likely to consider the lumpectomy treatment, particularly women living a distance from a radiation therapy center.