A new surgical technique for bone cancers

When it comes to bone cancers – such as osteosarcoma or Ewings sarcoma – surgical removal of the tumour-bearing bone is part of the standard treatment. Chemotherapy is part of the treatment, and sometimes radiotherapy, but resection of the bone is at the core of any curative program.  In days gone by this used to mean amputation of a limb, but these days a lot of work goes into limb-sparing surgery. And of course for those cases where the tumour is not in a limb, amputation isn’t an option any way.

In practice this means that very often surgery involves not just the removal of the effected bone, but also taking bone from another part of the body and slotting it into place a replacement. In my son’s case, George had three separate operations to treat the osteosarcoma in his jaw. The second and third time the ‘new’ mandible had to be replaced with a ‘newer’ one – in the end bone taken from his leg, his hip and a rib all to craft new jaw bones. While his was an extreme case, it shows what surgeons are capable off – but also gives an idea of how much trauma is involved to the patient. Some of the operations took more than 12 hours to complete. 

But what if there is a way to reduce the scale of the operation? What if the surgeons didn’t need to harvest new bone to replace the diseased one?

Surprisingly, such an approach does exist. It involves removing the diseased bone – making sure there are good margins as normal – and then the bone is treated to definitively kill the tumour cells. This is achieved by placing the resected bone in liquid nitrogen or bombarding it with very high doses of radiotherapy. Then the treated bone, now stripped of disease, is replaced in its original position. No need therefore to operate on other parts of the body to harvest bits of bone. No need for extensive remodelling.

Does this radical new treatment work? Recent papers show that the results are very good – there are lower rates of complications, low rates of disease recurrence, and of course lower risks of infection and faster recovery times.  For example in one study, published in the Bone and Joint Journal (http://www.bjj.boneandjoint.org.uk/content/96-B/4/555.abstract), no recurrences are reported at all in the grafted bones. 

That’s the good news. For patients in the UK the bad news is that this procedure, which was first used in Japan about 10 years ago, is not available. I remember asking for this for George, but got a blank look in return. So far as I know this is still not available in the UK – though I’d love to find out that someone, somewhere in the NHS has started doing this. It would make a huge difference to those people who’ve got primary bone cancers or bony metastases.