BERLIN (Reuters) – Cancer patients whose tumours are targetted with heat treatment as well as chemotherapy are more likely to stay alive and cancer-free for longer than those who receive only chemotherapy, researchers said this week.

The finding suggests it may be possible to cut the dose of chemotherapy drugs by using heat, although more research is needed to establish this, they said.

German researchers looking at cancers in soft tissues such as muscle, fat and tissue around the joints, found that heat treatment more than doubled the proportion of patients whose tumours responded to chemotherapy.

Importantly, the process did not increase the harmful effects of chemotherapy treatment.

BSD Medical makes the heat treatment system.

"We expect our findings will encourage other researchers to test the approach in other locally advanced cancers," said Rolf Issels, a professor of medical oncology at the University of Munich in Germany. "Targetted heat therapy has already shown promise in recurrent breast and locally advanced cervical cancer in combination with radiation, and studies combining it with chemotherapy in other localised tumours such as those in the pancreas and rectum are ongoing."

Heat therapy for cancer involves a technique known as regional hyperthermia, which uses focused electromagnetic energy to warm the tissue in and around the tumour to between 104 to 109.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

The heat not only kills cancer cells, but also seems to make chemotherapy work better by making cancer cells more sensitive, Issels said.

It also improves blood flow, allowing chemotherapy to be more effective.

Issels said his findings, presented at the ECCO-ESMO European cancer congress in Berlin, showed that soft tissue sarcoma patients receiving the targeted heat therapy plus chemotherapy "fared better on all outcome measurements".