Hepatic thermal injury promotes colorectal cancer engraftment in C57/black 6 mice.Treatment options for liver metastases (primarily colorectal cancer) are limited by high recurrence rates and persistent tumor progression.  Surgical approaches to management of these metastases typically use heat energy including electrocautery, argon beam coagulation, thermal ablation of surgical margins for hemostasis, and preemptive thermal ablation to prevent bleeding or to effect tumor destruction.  Based on high rates of local recurrence, these studies assess whether local effects of hepatic thermal injury (HTI) might contribute to poor outcomes by promoting a hepatic microenvironment favorable for tumor engraftment or progression due to induction of procancer cytokines and deleterious immune infiltrates at the site of thermal injury.  In this model, HTI resulted in a significant increase in engraftment and progression of MC38 tumors at the site of thermal injury.  Furthermore, there were local increases in expression of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) for hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF1α), arginase-1, and vascular endothelial growth factor α and activation changes in recruited macrophages at the HTI site but not in untreated liver tissue. 
THERM