25th June 2024
LMH alumnus Professor Andrew Hayes, Consultant General Surgeon and Surgical Oncologist with the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, features in the second series of ‘Super Surgeons – A Chance at Life’, currently airing on Channel 4.
The series follows Professor Hayes and his colleagues at the Royal Marsden as they attempt pioneering treatments to help patients with cancers that other doctors have been unable to treat. As a specialist in sarcoma and skin cancer, Professor Hayes operates on over 200 cases of sarcoma and 100 cases of advanced malignant melanoma each year, while also publishing widely on these diseases and lecturing all over the world.
In work that he describes as “pushing the boundaries of cancer surgery”, one of the innovative treatments that Professor Hayes leads on at Royal Marsden, is a treatment called Isolated Limb Perfusion (ILP). The Royal Marsden Hospital is the only hospital in the UK to offer this treatment. He explains, “The goal of this technique is to target a tumour growing in the arm or leg with very high doses of specialised chemotherapy. Before delivering the chemotherapy, I isolate the limb from the rest of the body by temporarily blocking the circulation of blood. This technique allows my team to target high doses of chemotherapy to the limb that hosts the tumour, meaning the healthy tissue in the rest of the body is protected from the dangerous side effects of receiving this specialised chemotherapy”. The aim of this treatment is to shrink tumours enough for them to become operable and so prevent an amputation.
Professor Hayes recently featured in an article in the Times, talking about ILP and giving insight into his surgical career.
If you want to learn more about the work being carried out by Professor Hayes and his colleagues, you can stream all four episodes of the second series of ‘Super Surgeons’ now on Channel 4, and the first series in which Professor Hayes is seen performing an ILP is also still available to view.