Combination therapy significantly boosts survival for certain liver cancer patients

During TACE, doctors inject tiny beads filled with chemotherapy directly into the blood vessels that supply the tumor. These beads release medicine to attack the cancer cells while also blocking the blood flow to the tumor. Thermal ablation uses high-energy radio waves to create heat at the tip of the catheter to further destroy tumor cells. – Image credit Dr. Harsh Shah

CANCER DIGEST – Aug. 8, 2026 – Adding heat to destroy tumor tissue after direct doses of chemotherapy in liver cancer that cannot be treated with surgery significantly increased overall survival in selected patients, clinical trial results show.

The clinical trial led by Ning Lyu, MD of Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center in  Guangzhou China, patients with liver cancers that could not be removed by surgery were treated with transarterial chemoembolization with and without added thermal ablation. The results were published online July 30, 2026 ahead of print in the journal JAMA Oncology.

Transarterial chemoembolization is a treatment that directly injects chemotherapy into tumors to kill tumor tissue. Thermal ablation is using radio waves to heat the tumor tissue to further destroy tumor cells.

In the trial, researchers randomly assigned 241 patients with liver cancers to be treated with the combination chemotherapy and thermal ablation (121),or were treated with the direct injection chemotherapy alone (120). Among the clinical outcomes the researchers aimed to improve was progression-free survival, meaning the time the cancer stops growing, and overall survival.

At the point when data collection was stopped more than 10 years after the first patient was treated, the results showed that those treated with the combination therapy had progression-free survival average of 17.7 months compared to 7.3 months for the chemotherapy alone group.

Overall survival in the combination therapy group was 86.6 months compared to 35.1 months in the chemotherapy alone group.

The results also showed that patient selection was essential to reaching the improved outcomes. After the chemoembolization the number and size of remaining tumors were evaluated. Only patients with low to moderate size and number of tumors received the thermal ablation.

In a JAMA commentary, it was pointed out that this trial started in 2015 and while it compared the combination therapy to the standard therapy at the time, it could not be compared to approaches using immunotherapy that have shown improvements in progression-free survival, but have had mixed results in terms of overall survival.

The researchers concluded that in this trial, the difference in progression-free survival and overall survival in these two groups of patients marks a significant improvement in outcomes with combined chemoembolization and thermal ablation approach for selected patients.

Sources: JAMA Oncology and Oncology News