CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Electrochemotherapy (ECT), a medical treatmentwidely used in human tumor treatment, consists in theadministration of bleomycin either systemically or locallyfollowed by the application of an electric field. This procedureincreases the toxicity of the bleomycin by 1000 fold in the treatedarea with an objective response rate of around 80%. Despite itssuccess related to efficiency, low cost and minimum side effects,there is still a 20% of cases in which the ECT treatment is notresponding. This could be ascribed to the fact that bleomycin,administered in the preferred way, that is, systemically for largetumors, is not properly reaching the whole tumor mass. Themain cause is poor tumor vascularization, in which case localadministration could cover areas unreachable with systemicadministration. To address this problem here we propose thecombined administration of bleomycin, systemic and locally,using companion animals as models for ECT tumor treating.Accordingly, we selected 7 canine and 2 feline patients with asingle tumor with poor or no response to ECT, and then werepeat the treatment with ECT but now with a combinedadministration of bleomycin, systemic and local. The resultsshow, according to an evaluation using the WHO criteria oftumor response, that from the 9 cases, 5 achieved a CompleteResponse, 3 a Partial Response, and 1 a Stable Disease after 30days from the combined treatment date. In conclusion, thecombined administration of bleomycin, systemic and local, inECT could provide a good response in tumors that previouslyshowed an unsatisfactory response. It is expected that theseresults could hopefully increase ECT efficiency.