Prof. Lisa X. Xu's team is the first to propose the concept of thermophysical immunotherapy for metastatic solid tumor therapy. Through the precise control of a hybrid thermal process involving rapid LN₂ cooling, followed by rapid radiofrequency heating, sufficient thermal and shear stress are generated to completely disintegrate the tumor cells and the newly formed tumor vessels. The sub-lethal temperatures are used to permit the maximal release of viable tumor antigens and molecular damage factors. The immunogenic death of tumor cells stimulated the response of antigen presenting cells, reversed tumor immunosuppressive microenvironment, and activated the CD4⁺ T cell-dominant neoantigen-specific immune response. The induced antitumor immune response can inhibit the recurrence and metastasis of solid tumors. The device for multi-mode thermal therapy is currently undergoing multi-center clinical trials.

Multi-mode thermal therapy induced antitumor immune response

Multi-mode thermal-immune therapy for metastatic tumor

A patient with liver tumor receiving multi-mode thermal therapy

Selected Publications:

1.        Wang X, Li W, Zhang K, et al. A novel local tumor progression prediction method for multimode ablation treatment. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2021.

2.        Wang S, Cheng M, Peng P, Lou Y, Zhang A, and Liu P. Iron released after cryo-thermal therapy induced M1 macrophage polarization, promoting the differentiation of CD4⁺ T cells into CTLs. International Journal of molecular sciences, 2021, 22(13):7010.

3.        Peng P, Hu H, Liu P, and Xu LX. Neoantigen-specific CD4+ T-cell response is critical for the therapeutic efficacy of cryo-thermal therapy. Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, 2020, 8(2): e000421.

4.        He K, Jia S, Lou Y, Liu P, and Xu LX. Cryo-thermal therapy induces macrophage polarization for durable anti-tumor immunity. Cell Death & Disease, 2019, 10(3): 216.

5.         He K, Liu P, and Xu LX. The cryo-thermal therapy eradicated melanoma in mice by eliciting CD4(+) T-cell-mediated antitumor memory immune response. Cell Death & Disease, 2017, 8(3): e2703.