BMC Cancer 2007, 7:189 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2407/7/189 Median PFS was 4 months (range 0-13 months) One year PFS rate was 10.3% Censored 0 PFrigougrreess1ion free survival Progression free survival. Discussion Docetaxel is recommended for second-line chemotherapy of non-small cell lung cancer, and weekly administration regimen showed a good safety, but recent studies resulted that the response rate and survive was still poor [12]. There are rare studies about hyperthermia for lung cancer, even it had been reported to improve the therapeutic effi- cacy in some drug insensitive tumors such as prostate can- cer and soft tissue sarcoma [17,18,20]. Structure of vascular in malignant tissue is great different from normal tissue, it was reported that the blood flow rate in normal tissue would be 30 times greater than tumor tissue [24]. This difference makes temperature of tumor tissue significantly higher than normal tissue under the same heat condition. Cytotoxic effect of several antitu- mor agents include docetaxel can be enhanced by raising Survival Function + Censored Median OS was 11 months (range 2-18 months) One year survival rate was 44.8% Censored 5 (17.2%) FOivgeurraell 2survival Overall survival. temperature [25]. Hyperthermia also shows as a comple- mentation of radiotherapy [26]. RF hyperthermia is pow- ered by electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength, it has the ability to go through whole human body and transforms to heat when different mediator encountered. Current study was designed to evaluate feasibility and effi- cacy of docetaxel plus RF hyperthermia for patients failed to response to prior platinum-containing chemotherapy. A total of 29 eligible patients enrolled in present study, 12 patients were of stage IIIa, 17 patients were of stage IIIb. 21 patients (72.4%) completed the arranged study treat- ment, while 8 patients (27.6%) discontinued. Main hematological toxicity was neutropenia, 7 patients (24.1%) experienced Grade 3,4 neutropenia, most of them were grade 3. With G-CSF hypodermic injection, this toxicity was well controlled. None of grade 4 non- hematological toxicities was observed, but grade 3 nausea, transaminase increasing, arthralgia and myalgia had been observed. Only 3 patients experienced grade 1 empyrosis, and they all self-recovered. Results above showed the comparable toxicities[7,11], it might indicate that regional RF hyperthermia does not increase the toxicity of chemotherapy. The therapeutic efficacy of the study treatment was accept- able, a response rate of 25.9% and a tumor control rate of 66.6% were better than docetaxel alone. A median PFS of 4 months and a median OS of 11 months might not be satisfied, but compared with docetaxel alone (median OS ranged from 6.4 to 9.2 months), these results were encouraging [7,8]. Conclusion Docetaxel weekly regimen in conjunction with regional RF hyperthermia acted as the second-line treatment for pretreated locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer was safe and well tolerant. The results of current study also suggested advantages in response and survival. A further phase III study is supported by these results. Competing interests The author(s) declare that they have no competing inter- ests. Authors' contributions ZJ designed this study and was in charge of the clinical protocol. WY analyzed the data and drafted the manu- script. ZJ, JM and YY enrolled patients in the clinical pro- tocol. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank all their colleagues who participated in this study: Prof. Hou Mei; Dr. Luo De Yun; Dr.Qiu Meng; Dr. Li Lu; Dr. Yan Xi; Dr. Gou Hong Feng (Cancer center of West China hospital). Special thanks Page 4 of 5 (page number not for citation purposes)