PHILADELPHIA (April 21, 2025) — Physicians at Fox Chase Cancer Center have begun accepting patients for a new clinical trial looking at the effectiveness of a hepatic artery infusion (HAI) pump along with standard chemotherapy. Fox Chase is the only local hospital offering this trial, which is designed for patients with colorectal cancer that has spread to the liver and cannot be treated with surgery.
HAI is a specially designed chemotherapy pump that uses a catheter to carry a tumor-killing drug called floxuridine directly into the liver. Few trials have been conducted on HAI pumps since the early 2000s, but results from those studies have indicated that patients who are treated with them may be able to eventually undergo surgery that wasn’t possible before.
“For many patients with colorectal cancer that has spread to the liver, surgery is not an option. For these patients, standard care is to treat them with chemotherapy indefinitely. In this trial, we look at the effectiveness of chemo alone but also compare it to this hepatic artery infusion pump used in conjunction with chemotherapy,” said Vanessa Wookey, MD, the Fox Chase principal investigator for the trial and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Hematology/Oncology.
Although approved by the Food and Drug Administration for metastatic colorectal cancer that has spread to the liver, HAI use in the United States is only now starting to increase. As its use becomes more common, trials like the one offered at Fox Chase provide more opportunities to gather data on its effectiveness and potentially improve patient care.
“The trial gives patients three to six months of standard chemotherapy and then introduces the pump. Our hope is that we will see similar results in our randomized trial that we’ve seen in other individual studies. This way we can improve patients’ survival by getting them to the point where surgery may once again be an option,” said Wookey.
The trial, “A Randomized Phase III Study of Systemic Therapy With or Without Hepatic Arterial Infusion for Unresectable Colorectal Liver Metastases: The PUMP Trial,” is now open at Fox Chase and accepting patients. It was designed by the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group and is being conducted with funding from the National Cancer Institute through its National Clinical Trials Network.
More details about the trial and eligibility requirements can be found at this link or by calling 215-214-1515.