Thanks Elodie,
I contacted his office yesterday ands am sending them my info for their review. It would be nice to remove these large tumors and gain some extra time hopefully on my feet:)
Elodie Espesset said:
I attended the SFA sarcoma conference yesterday so I saw Dr. Kato's presentation. He explained that usually tumors in the abdomen are considered inoperable by conventional surgery if they involve major blood vessels. Is this your case? He explained the reason was that removing those blood vessels would kill the healthy organs they supply. Transplantation is not used in cancer for 2 reasons. The first one is that patients are given medications to suppress the immune system after a transplant which could be bad for a cancer patient and the second reason is the supply of organs is limited. So instead of using conventional surgery or transplantation, he does something like an "autotransplantation". He removes the organs supplied by the blood vessels involved in the tumor and put then in a special bath (similar to what would be used for a transplantation I am guessing), then removed the tumor with the part of blood vessels involved, then reconstruct the blood vessels with a synthetic material, then put back the healthy organs. I don't know if he is the only surgeon using this technique. He is certainly the first. His first patient who was an old lady lived 4 or 5 years past the surgery. She eventually passed away from brain metastases. He operated on a young girl in 2009 and she is still in remission. I think this is an option worth looking into...