Jane Lee, a former patient of mine WhatsApp me this link about medical researchers at NUS in Singapore using magnetic pulses to treat cancers - particularly breast cancers. She solicited my opinion asking me to explain in non-technical language how it works, and how successful it is?
First, before I answer Ms Jane, below is the news report from Straits Times Jane sent to me in pink:
My answer for Jane, explained in very simple non-technical language, is typed in blue below. Please scroll right down.
SINGAPORE – Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have found that using intermittent, low-intensity magnetic pulses could transform a corrupted class of immune cells that typically promote cancer growth into cells that attack and destroy cancer cells.
These scientists have successfully used this approach for targeted breast cancer therapy without the use of chemotherapy.
The pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMFs) completely eradicated tumours in 75 per cent of tested pre-clinical models after just four 30-minute sessions.
PEMFs are gentle, low-energy magnetic waves that pass safely through the body without generating heat or damaging tissue.
Alfredo Franco-Obregon, principal investigator, NUS Institute for Health Innovation and Technology, who led the research, said that rather than shocking the body, the pulses “act like a biological tuning fork”.
“When they pass through cells, they interact with specialised microscopic gates on the cell surface called TRPC1 channels, which act as biological antennae for weak magnetic fields. Opening these gates triggers a small, controlled wave of calcium into the cell that activates the mitochondria, the cell’s energy furnace,” he said.
“In healthy tissues, this acts like a brisk workout. The energy stimulates cellular repair, boosts energy production and primes the tissue to heal. In cancer cells, the excess stimulation overloads an already unstable system, making PEMFs precision tools that can either warm up or overheat cells, depending on their resting temperatures,” Franco-Obregon added.
This recent discovery, published in Smart Medicine, an international, open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal, on June 4, was built on the team’s previous work, which showed that brief PEMF exposure enhances the uptake of doxorubicin (DOX), a chemotherapy drug, by breast cancer cells.
Global breast cancer cases are projected to rise by a third, from 2.3 million in 2023 to more than 3.5 million by 2050, while annual deaths may nearly double from 764,000 to nearly 1.4 million.
In Singapore, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, accounting for around 30 per cent of all female cancer diagnoses.
According to the Singapore Cancer Registry Annual Report of 2023, one in 12 women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime.
Yet, breast cancer treatment faces challenges such as drug resistance, treatment-related toxicities and tumour heterogeneity, which means that cancer cells are not all identical but instead show distinct genetic, molecular and physical differences.
Franco-Obregon, a research associate professor from the Department of Surgery at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, told The Straits Times that his team’s research focused on the calcium channel protein that “breast cancers overexpress to fuel rapid proliferation and quick spreading”.
The protein forms a tunnel in the cell membrane, allowing calcium ions to flow through – an important process for many cellular functions.
“This excess makes cancer cells uniquely vulnerable to calcium overload and mitochondrial overheating,” he added.
With targeted PEMFs, the scientists exploited this vulnerability in a two-pronged precision approach.
First, they induced acute calcium and metabolic stress, affecting the energy systems within cancer cells, without harming healthy tissue. This enhanced the uptake of standard chemotherapeutic drugs, which in turn reduced the required chemotherapy dosages and lessened debilitating side effects.
Second, the magnetic pulses reprogrammed the immune cells that promote cancer growth to consume breast cancer cells instead, restoring the immune system’s ability to detect and attack cancer.
“In our published findings, PEMF exposure halved the effective dosage required for drugs like doxorubicin to suppress cancer cells. Rather than projecting an unrealistic leap to 100 per cent eradication, our clinical objective is to maximise efficacy while slashing toxicity.
“We aim to preserve the patient’s quality of life and immune health without compromising therapeutic impact,” Franco-Obregon explained.
He added that the use of magnetic pulses to directly destroy cancer cells by burning, freezing or rupturing them, as well as to change the behaviour of immune cells, has so far been shown only in pre-clinical laboratory models.
But translating these findings into patient care “is already well under way”.
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“As we have already completed our initial Phase I safety trial in breast cancer patients, we have crossed the first major clinical hurdle.
“The next step is our Phase II clinical trial, which will evaluate how effectively PEMF shrinks tumours and enhances chemotherapy in a larger group of patients over the next two to three years,” he said.
Franco-Obregon said that if the results confirm what the team had already observed in the laboratory, larger multi-centre trials would follow to support formal regulatory approval from agencies like the Singapore Health Sciences Authority and the US Food and Drug Administration.
“In practical terms, broad adoption as standard hospital care typically takes several years of rigorous validation. However, eligible breast cancer patients may have opportunities to receive the therapy much sooner by participating directly in our upcoming clinical trials,” he said.
Franco-Obregon cautioned that while PEMF represents an exciting, non-invasive frontier in precision oncology, it remains an investigational therapy that should complement, not replace, proven medical care.
“Yet, to accelerate this timeline, our team is actively seeking forward-looking clinical trial sites, oncology collaborators and funding partners to co-develop and scale this non-invasive therapy towards widespread patient access,” he said.
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Dear Jane,
Thank you for sending me the article. This is certainly an interesting piece of cancer research from the National University of Singapore (NUS), but I would be a little careful about interpreting the results because this is still an investigational treatment, rather than an established treatment that doctors can routinely offer to cancer patients.
Let me try to explain the idea in very simple language.
Imagine that your body is a large, well-protected city. Your immune system is like the city's police and security forces. Normally, these security forces patrol the city looking for dangerous intruders such as cancer cells.
But cancer is rather clever. It can sometimes recruit or corrupt some of the body's own security guards and persuade them to protect the cancer instead of attacking it. One important group of these immune cells is called tumour-associated macrophages, or TAMs.
So we can imagine a breast tumour as a group of criminals who have not only built a hideout inside the city, but have also managed to persuade some of the city's security guards to protect them.
The NUS researchers are trying to solve this problem in two different ways using very gentle, intermittent magnetic pulses called pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMFs).
1. Making the cancer cells vulnerable
Cancer cells are not exactly the same as normal cells. Some breast cancer cells have unusually large numbers of certain microscopic channels in their outer membrane. One of these is called TRPC1.
You can imagine these channels as small doors or gates in the wall of a house.
The magnetic pulses appear to interact with these gates and allow more calcium ions to enter the cancer cells. Calcium is normally essential for cells, just as electricity and fuel are essential for a machine.
The calcium then stimulates the cell's mitochondria — the tiny structures that produce energy for the cell.
Here is a simple analogy.
Imagine a factory with many electrical motors. A little extra electricity may make the factory work harder. But if you keep pushing too much activity through an already overstretched factory, the machinery can become overloaded and eventually break down.
That is roughly the idea here.
The researchers are trying to exploit a weakness of the cancer cell. The magnetic pulses create a metabolic stress that cancer cells may be less able to tolerate than surrounding healthy tissue.
So the magnetic field is not simply cooking the tumour like a microwave oven. That would be a misleading way of describing it. The researchers are using the magnetic pulses to disturb particular biological processes inside the cancer cells.
2. Turning the cancer's "bodyguards" against it
The second part is perhaps even more interesting.
Remember our imaginary city?
The cancer has recruited some of the city's security guards and persuaded them to protect the criminals.
The researchers found that the magnetic treatment can re-programme these tumour-associated macrophages. Instead of helping the tumour, they can be shifted towards an anti-tumour state in which they attack and consume cancer cells.
So rather than bringing an entirely new army into the body, the researchers are trying to change the behaviour of some of the body's existing immune cells.
It is rather like discovering that some of the policemen guarding a criminal gang have been deceived or recruited by the gang — and finding a way to restore them to their original duty of protecting the city.
3. Why this might also reduce chemotherapy
There is another interesting part of the NUS research.
The researchers had previously found that magnetic pulses could increase the uptake of the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin by breast cancer cells. In their laboratory work, magnetic exposure reduced the effective amount of drug required to suppress the cancer cells by about half under the experimental conditions.
The possible advantage is therefore not necessarily "magnetic treatment instead of chemotherapy".
It could eventually be:
magnetic treatment + a smaller amount of chemotherapy = similar or better anti-cancer effect with less drug exposure.
Think of it like using a key to open the door of the enemy's building before sending in the soldiers. If the soldiers can reach their target more efficiently, perhaps fewer soldiers are needed.
But that is still a research hypothesis that has to be demonstrated in patients. We should not yet tell patients that they will definitely be able to receive half the chemotherapy.
So how successful is it?
This is where we have to be particularly careful.
In the NUS researchers' preclinical models, magnetic treatment alone completely eradicated tumours in 75% of the tested models after four 30-minute sessions. That is a very interesting laboratory result.
But 75% in preclinical models does not mean that 75% of human patients have been cured.
That is an extremely important distinction.
For example, imagine that a new medicine completely cures 75 out of 100 laboratory animals. That tells us that the treatment has produced a strong biological effect under those experimental conditions.
But before we can say that it works in people, we have to ask many more questions:
Does it work equally well in different types and stages of breast cancer?
Does it shrink tumours in humans?
Does it prevent recurrence?
How long does the effect last?
Are there side effects that were not apparent in laboratory models?
Which patients are most likely to benefit?
And, most importantly, does it improve survival or quality of life compared with existing treatments?
Those questions can only be answered properly through progressively larger clinical trials.
Where has NUS reached now?
There is an important update to the newspaper report that is worth noting.
The NUS team says that the same PEMF device has already completed an initial Phase I clinical trial in breast-cancer patients, whose principal purpose was to establish safety. The next step is a Phase II trial, which is intended to examine how effectively the treatment works in patients and whether it can shrink tumours and/or work together with chemotherapy.
So I would describe the present situation like this:
It is no longer purely a laboratory experiment, but it is not yet an established cancer treatment either.
It has crossed the first important bridge from laboratory research into human testing, but the much bigger question — "Does it actually work well enough in patients to become a standard treatment?" — remains to be answered.
The researchers themselves are appropriately cautious. They describe PEMF as an investigational therapy and say that it should complement, rather than replace, proven cancer treatments while the clinical evidence is being developed.
So, Jane, my simple summary would be:
The NUS researchers are not using a magnetic field simply to "burn away" a breast tumour. They are attempting something more subtle: using carefully timed magnetic pulses to exploit a weakness in cancer cells while simultaneously changing some immune cells around the tumour from cancer helpers into cancer fighters.
The idea is scientifically fascinating. The laboratory results are encouraging, and early human safety testing has been completed. But we still have to wait for the larger clinical trials to find out how effective and how safe it really is for breast-cancer patients.
That is the difference between an exciting scientific discovery and a proven medical treatment.
I hope my explanation is satisfactory
- JB Lim
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