Hyperthermia and its modern use in cancer treatment

In the current issue, Jones et al. have demonstrated that treatment of advanced cervical carcinoma with concurrent hyperthermia, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy is well tolerated and associated with significant efficacy. Although Jones et al. rightly speculate on the connection between experimental and clinical data regarding the antineoplastic role of hyperthermia, it is not clear that the experimental results are relevant to the clinical findings. More than 100 years after the discovery of hyperthermia's activity against advanced cervical carcinoma, the mechanism of this activity and the optimal strategy for harnessing it have yet to be uncovered.