Arterial therapies of colorectal cancer metastases to the liver

Intra-arterial therapies directed to the liver take advantage that liver tumors are fed by the hepatic artery while the liver vascularization is 30% arterial. Most common techniques of intra-arterial therapies for colorectal cancer liver metastases (CRLM) include intra-arterial hepatic chemotherapy (IAHC), transarterial chemoembolization (TACE), and radioembolization. Such treatments are used as salvage therapies because they provide response when systemic therapies are inefficient. They are also used as a first line therapy to produce maximal response in order to convert the patient from non-surgical to surgical. IAHC with FUDR or oxaliplatinum allow 90% response rate and conversion to surgery of 40% to 50% of initially inoperable patients. TACE is used in CRLM with promising response rate, namely due to the use of drug eluting beads that can be loaded with irinotecan which can elute the drug they contain after embolization in liver tumor. Radioembolization is a unique way of delivering a high tumoricidal dose of radiation (>100 Gy) to liver tumor without harming the healthy liver, and provided interesting results in salvage therapy, enough to be evaluated today in a randomized control trial in first line therapy where FOLFOX is proposed with and without additional radioembolization.