Percutaneous Microwave Coagulation Therapy: A Promising Therapeutic Method for Breaking the Barrier of the Intertumor Heterogeneity

Intertumor heterogeneity is common in various cancers and has been widely accepted as the primary cause of the diversity and variation of the effect of the same treatment on patients with the same type of tumor. Percutaneous microwave coagulation therapy (PMCT) is a minimally invasive and effective approach for destroying tumors by microwave beam under image guidance, which has been applied in lung cancer. However, no previous study has investigated the capability of PMCT solving intertumor heterogeneity. Here, we performed a component analysis of four lung cancer patients’ tumor microenvironment (TME) via single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and treated all four cases with PMCT. One patient’s TME could be classified into a hot tumor, mainly proinflammatory cytokines, and T cell infiltration. The other three patients’ TMEs were cold tumors, where immunosuppressive cells occupied a large proportion, including tumor-associated macrophages and cancer cells. Despite a high level of heterogeneity among their tumor microenvironment compositions, disease type and stage, and basic physical conditions, all four patients presented a stable disease (SD) without any cancer cell detected in the TME of cancer tissues after PMCT. In conclusion, this report uniquely contributed to the knowledge of the PMCT adaptation to tumor heterogeneity. Therefore, PMCT is promising to demonstrate a stable and robust antitumor efficacy in unresectable lung cancers with various TMEs.

Post biopsy Liver Hemorrhage Successfully Controlled by Ultrasound-guided Percutaneous Microwave Ablation

Percutaneous microwave coagulation therapy has been one of the major new developments in tumor ablation. Microwave ablation has also been used intraoperatively to achieve hemostasis at surgical margins in laparotomy. However, the use of microwave ablation for coagulation and hemostasis through percutaneous approach has not been described in the literature. Here, we report a case of hepatic amyloidosis with massive post biopsy liver hemorrhage, which could not be by transarterial embolization, and subsequently controlled by ultrasound-guided percutaneous microwave ablation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported case of this technology application in human.