When Vic Eliason's doctor told him the prostate cancer he'd been battling for a decade had spread to his liver, his first thoughts were about his grandchildren.

But today — four years since that diagnosis — Eliason tells Newsmax Health he is healthy and his cancer is in check. At 77, the Wisconsin radio talk-show host is embracing life with a new vigor.

The reason: Eliason underwent a pioneering new cancer treatment — known as TheraSphere therapy — that targets tumors in an entirely new way. Experts say the treatment could mean liver cancer will no longer be a death sentence for the nearly 31,000 Americans diagnosed each year, nine in 10 of whom now die within 5 years.

Eliason's doctor — Eric Hohenwalter, M.D., an interventional radiologist at the Clinical Cancer Center at the Froedtert & Medical College of Wisconsin — is one of the few specialists offering the cutting-edge treatment. The early results have been so promising against liver tumors, he says MCW doctors are now testing it against colon cancer and other hard-to-treat forms of the disease that have spread to the liver.

To date, about 5,000 patients have undergone the therapy. But experts expect those numbers to grow as more cases like Eliason's demonstrate its safety and effectiveness.

TheraSphere works by delivering tiny radioactive glass beads — smaller than the period at the end of this sentence — to tumors via blood vessels that feed them - to kill the tumors.

Unlike conventional treatments — such as external-beam radiation, chemotherapy, freezing, or burning tumors to kill them — TheraSphere selectively attacks cancer cells but doesn't damage healthy tissues.

Within weeks of undergoing the procedure, one of the tumors in Eliason's liver was gone and a second had shrunk to a third its size, and was no longer a threat.