On September 19th, Markus Notter presented “40 years of hyperthermia and radiotherapy: A personal experience” at the 28th annual meeting of the SASRO in Sursee/Switzerland.
The radiation oncologist Markus Notter – who worked for many years at the Cantonal Hospital of Aarau, then at the Hôpitale Cantonale La-Chaux-de-Fonds, and now at the Lindenhofspital Bern – is one of the pioneers who began working in the field of hyperthermia in combination with radiotherapy already in the early 1980s.
One of the “first therapy attempts” was a locally recurrent sarcoma in the head and neck area in 1982 with two American Siretherm applicators 434 MHz. In 1988, he was the world’s first user of the BSD2000 device for deep hyperthermia at the Cantonal Hospital of Aarau. The collaboration with Hydrosun and Heckel began in 2011 with the development of thermographically controlled wIRA surface hyperthermia, a method of contact-free hyperthermia that opened up a new treatment option especially for large-sized tumors. From the very first approach, he has documented all treatments and results and published the first 73 patients in 2016, followed by the first 201 patients in 2020 together with other users. He is the medical pioneer of this method, and the development of the hydrosun®TWH1500 device would not have been possible without him. In addition, Markus Notter and Stephan Bodis were the leading figures in the founding of the SwissHyperthermiaNetwork, which led to an unprecedented spread and acceptance of hyperthermia combined with radiotherapy in one of the most developed healthcare systems in the world. There are now 5 hydrosun®TWH1500 systems in use in Switzerland, and 10 more in other European countries.
Thank you, Markus!
