BATON ROUGE — Most stomach cancers are found when the disease has spread beyond the stomach and a cure is less likely. A new approach to treatment called HIPEC delivers heated-liquid chemotherapy directly to the abdomen, where it can target the cancer.

During a HIPEC treatment, the abdominal cavity is bathed with hot chemotherapy to kill any microscopic cancer cells.

"The chemo can stay locally in that region, the abdomen, and then it can continue to work even past the procedure. And then that allows us to use really high concentrations of the chemo and right directly where the cancer is,” Travis Grotz, a surgical oncologist, said.

HIPEC has been used as a treatment for other cancers for several decades but just recently has been adapted to stomach cancer.

"We used a kind of a different combination of drugs that we came up with based on other research and data and experience, and put them together and found that, in our experience, that they were more synergistic. They work together to kill the cancer cells very well. And our outcomes were quite a bit better than kind of traditional systemic chemotherapy,” Grotz said.

The outcomes have been significantly better than those achieved with traditional chemotherapy. However, Grotz notes that more studies are ongoing.

"We want to improve survival, help people live longer, spend more time with their family, do it in a way that's safer, and has less complications and risks to patients,” he said.