New research finds that combining high doses of powerful chemotherapy drugs and higher temperatures is giving some cancer patients a better chance of survival.

Cancer patient Brian Leroy has tried this "hot" approach. Leroy was diagnosed in 2006 with cancer in his appendix. The survival rate for this form of the disease is low: only 20 per cent of patients live five years. Leroy admits he was scared when he first learned of his disease.

"You think of your family. You think of all the things you enjoy in life and you think: how am I going to solve this?" he remembers.

Leroy was advised to undergo surgery to remove the tumour, and then told of an experimental treatment being tested at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre at the University of Calgary and Foothills Medical Centre.

The treatment involves a new way of delivering chemotherapy: not through the usual IV drip into the bloodstream; but directly into the abdomen.

The other added twist: the chemo drugs are heated up to 40 to 42 degrees Celsius to boost their cancer-killing power. The treatment is called intra-peritoneal hyperthermic chemotherapy.

Dr. Walley Temple, of the Foothills Medical Centre, says heat doesn't make all chemotherapy drugs more effective. But in some, it causes the drugs to become 75 to 100 per cent more active than if given at room temperature intravenously.

"It is a very exciting advance in what we can give these patients, which in the past was an incurable disease," Temple says.

A recent study from researchers at the University of Calgary found that on more than 100 Canadian patients with abdominal cancers, survival rates were boosted by over 30 per cent for some advanced colon cancers, and up to 50 per cent in cancer of the appendix.

"I think there are people living now who would not have lived 10 years ago with the same problem," says Dr. Lloyd Mack, a surgical oncologist Tom Baker Cancer Centre.

One of those surviving is Brian Leroy.

"I am very fortunate that I found my way to one of the few surgeons in North America that does this procedure and I am quite confident he saved my life," he says.

There are now several Canadian hospitals that are testing hot chemo and its use in those with stomach cancer, a form of lung cancer called mesothelioma, and even ovarian cancer.

With a report from CTV medical specialist Avis Favaro and producer Elizabeth St. Philip