Typically, a patient in need of chemotherapy for treatment of a cancerous tumor gets the chemotherapeutic medicine intravenously or by taking the medication orally. The medication then travels through the bloodstream to almost all parts of the body.

This method of chemotherapy administration has two major interrelated drawbacks. First, the medicine gets diluted in the bloodstream, so the tumor gets a diluted dose of cancer-fighting medicine. Second, the patient may experience side effects from the chemotherapy. Typically, if you increase the dose so that the tumor receives a higher dose, the patient experiences more side effects.

Infusion therapy is a new endovascular technique in which cancer-fighting medication (chemotherapy) is delivered directly to the site of the tumor, and therefore has the benefit of decreasing the side effects of chemotherapy while delivering a higher dose of chemotherapy to the tumor.

Using endovascular techniques, a catheter is placed into the artery that feeds the tumor, and the chemotherapeutic medication is injected directly into that blood vessel (see image 21-01 below). The physicians at the Hyman-Newman Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery and the Center for Endovascular Surgery are on the leading edge of infusion therapy for the treatment of tumors.