Andrew Kennedy, MD

Not long ago, our approach to treating difficult metastatic tumors was to “spray and pray.” We knew that chemotherapy and other traditional treatment approaches could cause great damage and had a limited chance of successfully destroying the entire tumor. At the time, a proven safer and more effective option did not exist, and patients were desperately in need of treatment. Fortunately, as our knowledge of the complexities of advanced liver tumors has grown, so has our ability to develop treatments that target and treat tumors while avoiding harmful side effects to normal tissue.

Radioactive microsphere therapy is gaining in popularity among specialists who deal with both primary and metastatic solid tumors in the liver (see images on page 1 and "On the cover" box below). During the past 2 years, sessions dedicated to this therapeutic approach have been held in meetings of all major related specialties: interventional radiology, radiology, radiation oncology, surgical oncology, hepatobiliary surgery, nuclear medicine, and medical oncology.