Sooner or later every family asks us for the evidence. This is the study we point them to.
All guidesPublished clinical research
The Cytotron Trial
Ninety-eight people with advanced solid tumours, all of whom had been told by their oncologist that no further treatment was available. Each received one hour of Cytotron therapy a day for 28 days. This is what the researchers found, and how to make sense of it.
Who took part
This matters more than any other single fact about the study, so it comes first.
Every person in this trial had a confirmed, biopsy-proven solid tumour, and every one of them had been formally declared terminally ill by their treating oncologist. Almost all had already been through conventional cancer treatment. For nearly all of them, there was no remaining standard option: no further chemotherapy on offer, no further surgery, no further radiotherapy.
They came from India, Europe, South East Asia, the United States and Africa. The youngest was 15 and the oldest was 84, with an average age of 54. Fifty-five were women and 43 were men. Eleven different tumour types were represented, and breast cancer was the single most common.
- 98 patients enrolled between February 2006 and March 2010
- 86 completed the full 28-day course; 12 stopped early, mostly because their disease progressed or other illness intervened
- Followed for 12 months after treatment, or until death
- Approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee under Indian Council of Medical Research guidelines
Which cancers were treated
All 98 patients enrolled. Breast cancer was the largest single group.
The miscellaneous group covers single or small numbers of cases across upper gastrointestinal, appendix, gall bladder, nasopharynx, sino-nasal, thyroid, bladder, endometrial, sarcoma, melanoma and lymphoma diagnoses.
What the treatment involved
One hour a day, on 28 consecutive days. Nothing entered the body, nothing was cut, and no drug was given.
Before treatment began, each patient had an MRI scan. That scan was used for something specific: measuring the proton density of the tumour, which is a physical property of the tissue. Those measurements were fed into the planning computer, and the energy for that individual patient was calculated from their own tumour rather than from a standard setting. Where a patient had several tumours, the plan could target them in the same session.
The patient then lay on the bed of the device for an hour while the calculated field was delivered. They stayed awake throughout. The device works at the non-ionising, non-thermal end of the electromagnetic spectrum, which means it neither behaves like radiotherapy nor treats by heating tissue.
The scan was not just for diagnosis. It was the blueprint the machine was programmed from, so that the treatment each person received was calculated from the physical properties of their own tumour.
How long patients lived
This was the trial's main question, and it produced its most striking result.
Before treatment started, each patient's expected survival was calculated using an established prognostic model that oncologists use in palliative care. It takes into account blood counts, breathlessness, appetite, pain and general physical condition. On that basis, the average patient in this group was expected to live about 117 days.
What actually happened was that the average patient lived 377 days. The chart below shows the two curves side by side.
Survival after treatment: expected against observed
The 86 patients who completed the 28-day course, followed for 18 months.
Expected survival is a calculated estimate from a prognostic scoring model, not a group of real untreated patients. Section 07 explains why that distinction matters.
Two figures from this chart are worth holding onto. At nine months, the model had predicted that none of these patients would still be alive; 44 of them were. At twelve months, 40 patients were alive, which is 47 per cent of the group.
The researchers also compared median survival against a published group of similar patients treated conventionally. Median means the midpoint: half the group lived longer, half died sooner.
Median survival compared with a similar patient group
Bars show the midpoint survival time, with the range the researchers were 95 per cent confident the true figure sits within.
Comparison group: 127 patients from a previously published study. Cytotron group: 78 patients from this trial with complete survival data.
What happened to the tumours
A month after finishing treatment, 51 of the patients came back for a follow-up scan. Their tumours were measured against internationally agreed rules called RECIST, which is the same standard used to judge whether a cancer drug is working.
Tumour status one month after treatment
The 51 patients who returned for follow-up imaging.
Of the 40 whose disease was controlled, 36 were stable, meaning the tumour had neither grown nor shrunk measurably, and 4 had a measurable reduction in tumour size.
For people with advanced cancer that had been progressing, a tumour that stops growing is a meaningful result in itself. It is the difference between a disease that is advancing and one that is holding still.
Those 36 stable patients were followed further. Twelve months after treatment, 8 were still stable and 2 had no detectable tumour remaining. Two had progressed by that point, and the rest were not available for imaging at the twelve-month mark.
How patients felt
Survival was not the only thing measured. For someone with advanced cancer, how well they feel and what they can still do often matters as much as how long they live.
Two standard tools were used. The Karnofsky score rates how independently a person can function, from 100 (fully active) down to 0. The FACT-G questionnaire asks the patient themselves about physical, social, emotional and functional wellbeing across 21 questions. Both improved.
Wellbeing before and after the 28-day course
86 patients. Both changes were statistically significant, meaning they are very unlikely to be chance.
A rise in the Karnofsky score means patients were more able to look after themselves and carry out normal activity. A rise in FACT-G means they reported feeling better across physical, emotional, social and functional wellbeing.
Patients did not simply live longer while feeling worse. On both measures, on average, they felt and functioned better at the end of the four weeks than when they started.
Side effects
Not one patient stopped treatment because of a side effect. No severe or systemic adverse effect was recorded, and no serious adverse event was attributed to the device.
That finding carries more weight than it might first appear, because of how closely these patients were watched. Eighty-six people completed the full 28 days, which is more than 2,400 individual hour-long treatment sessions. A doctor and a nurse examined every patient on every one of those days, recording anything they found. Across all of it, vital signs stayed within normal limits, and nothing required treatment to be stopped, paused or reduced.
What patients did and did not experience
Every effect recorded during the trial, set against the toxicities that commonly accompany cancer treatment.
Not reported in this trial
- Hair loss
- Nausea and vomiting
- Suppression of the immune system
- Cumulative radiation dose limiting future treatment
- Any effect severe enough to interrupt a course
Reported, and mild in every case
- Headache and light-headedness, in some patients with brain tumours
- A tingling sensation at the treatment site
- Minor bleeding, in two patients with advanced nasopharyngeal and bladder cancer
None of these interrupted anyone's treatment, and all settled without the course being changed.
This safety profile follows from the physics rather than from luck. The device uses no ionising radiation, so there is no accumulating dose of the kind that limits how much radiotherapy a person can receive in a lifetime. It produces no significant heating, so it does not burn tissue. And it delivers no drug into the bloodstream, so there is nothing circulating to affect the bone marrow, the gut lining or the hair follicles. The mechanisms that make chemotherapy and radiotherapy hard to tolerate are simply not in play.
Because you should have the complete picture, and because it matters practically. If you do feel something during a session, we want you to tell us rather than assume it could not possibly be related. Everything on that list settled on its own, and nobody's treatment was changed because of it.
How to read these results
The findings above are real and they are published. But no single study settles a question in medicine, and you should understand what this one can and cannot tell you before you weigh it.
There was no control group
Everyone in this trial received the treatment. Nobody was randomly assigned to receive nothing, which is the design that proves a treatment caused an effect. The survival comparison is against a calculated prediction and against a published group of other patients, not against a matched group studied alongside. Prognostic models are estimates, and they can be pessimistic. That is the single biggest limitation here.
The patients may not have been typical
Everyone here was well enough to travel to Bengaluru and lie still for an hour a day for 28 days. Patients who can do that tend to be in better shape than the average person with the same diagnosis, and better baseline condition on its own predicts longer survival.
Not everyone was followed up
Of the 86 who completed treatment, 51 returned for imaging at one month. That is 59 per cent. The tumour response figures describe those 51 people, and we cannot know what the scans of the other 35 would have shown.
It was a single centre, and the centre developed the device
The study was run at the research centre of the company that makes the Cytotron. That does not make the results wrong, but independent replication at other centres carries more weight, and it has not yet been published.
What this study is
It is a pilot study: an early trial designed to find out whether something is worth investigating properly. It found a strong enough signal to justify that, and the US Food and Drug Administration subsequently granted the Cytotron a Breakthrough Device Designation for breast, liver and pancreatic tumours in 2019. That designation speeds up the path to larger trials.
We would rather you heard all of this from us than discovered it later from your oncologist. A treatment worth considering can survive an honest account of its evidence, and this one does.
The published paper
Kumar R, Augustus M, Nair AR, Ebner R, Nayar GS, Kumar RV. Quantum Magnetic Resonance Therapy: Targeting Biophysical Cancer Vulnerabilities to Effectively Treat and Palliate. Journal of Clinical & Experimental Oncology, 2016; volume 5, issue 2, article 1000156.
Study conducted at the Scalene Center for Advanced Research and Development, Bengaluru, India, between February 2006 and March 2010. The device used was the CYTOTRON-RTE-6040-864GEN, a Class IIA medical therapeutic device. Electromagnetic safety was independently assessed by the Electronics and Radar Development Establishment, Ministry of Defence, Government of India, against International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection limits.
You can read the full paper yourself or pass it to your own doctor: Download the full paper (PDF, 3 MB)