After sending out several emails to multiple facilities with published research on HITHOC – Dr. Michael Ried of the University Medical Center in Regensburg, Germany responded with some interesting information about the thoracic surgery program at his facility, led by Dr. Hans Stefan Hofmann (who was cited in previous posts) and is the primary author of an article in German, called “Cytoreductive surgery and hyperthermic intrathoracic chemotherapy perfusion.”
Dr. Ried reports that surgical treatment of thymoma and malignant pleural mesothelioma are two of the procedures their department specializes in. Since 2008, they have been performing HITHOC in these patients in combination with pleurectomy and decortication.
Dr. Reid reports that they will be publishing the results of a prospective study based on their experiences with HITHOC in the near future.
Contact information/ Program Summary details:
(note – site is entirely in German, no English version)
University Medical Center: http://www.barmherzige-regensburg.de
Department of Thoracic Surgery: http://www.barmherzige-regensburg.de/thoraxchirurgie.html
Chief of Thoracic Surgery: Dr. Hans Stefan Hofmann
Email: thoraxchirurgie@barmherzige-regensburg.de
I’ve included visible link information for your information. Google translate will translate the website, as needed.
I have requested some additional program information, and will update this page, as soon as I receive it.
Additional Resources:
Dr. Hofmann is primary author on more than 40 journal articles on thoracic surgery topics (in English) – several dealing with lung cancer on a cellular level. I have posted just a very small sample of citations here that I have selected among full text articles available on-line. (Names of articles may have been changed).
1. The wind of change in the therapy of lung cancer – in this free full-text article from 2006, Dr. Hofmann talks about the future of treatment for lung cancer.
2. The DNA of lung cancer – this article talks about specific DNA markers for aggressive lung cancers, and how these markers may be useful in targeting / treating disease.
3. Diagnosing lung cancer with DNA
4. While Dr. Hofmann is not the primary author on this article about treating a soldier wounded in Afghanistan with artificial lung therapies – I thought it dovetailed nicely with our recent discussions on artificial lungs/ ecmo and ecmo-like therapies and future developments etc.
Thoracic Surgery 