No woman should have to forgo advanced cancer treatment simply because private healthcare is out of reach. The H.E.A.T. Foundation, a women-led foundation, is stepping in to change that.
Johannesburg, South Africa (25 August 2026) – Every woman deserves high-quality, compassionate cancer care, regardless of her financial situation. A new South African non-profit is making this a reality by bringing a proven, life-saving adjunctive treatment directly into the public healthcare system – starting with women fighting locally advanced cervical cancer.
Founded by hyperthermic oncology researcher Dr Carrie Minnaar, alongside medical leaders Dr Prinitha Pillay and Dr Thanushree Naidoo, the H.E.A.T. Foundation (Hyperthermia: Equitable, Accessible Treatment) was created to bridge the gap in healthcare equity.
By expanding access to evidence-based treatments for women relying on public care, the foundation is actively supporting South Africa’s 2026–2030 Strategic Framework to eliminate cervical cancer and aligning with global goals to ensure no woman is left behind.
The Strategic Framework rests on three commitments: vaccinate 90% of girls by age 15, screen 70% of women twice in their lifetime using a high-performance test and treat 90% of women with precancerous disease and 90% of women with invasive cancer. Recent implementation updates have focused particularly on prevention and screening.
“Vaccination protects the next generation, and screening helps prevent cancer through earlier detection. But neither can replace treatment for the woman who arrives at an oncology unit today with locally advanced disease,” Minnaar says.
“Treatment remains an important part of the elimination plan, and with the disease burden carried by our public health facilities, anything that helps us treat these women better will go a long way towards eliminating cervical cancer.”
The scale is not marginal.
About 11,000 South African women were diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2022, and roughly 6,000 died of it, according to the Department of Health. An analysis of National Cancer Registry data spanning 2011 to 2021 put national incidence at 30.4 cases per 100 000 women a year, peaking among women aged 55 to 64. The World Health Organisation’s elimination threshold is four per 100 000.
Minnaar led a Phase III randomised controlled trial at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital through Wits University that enrolled 210 women with locally advanced cervical cancer between 2014 and 2017 and followed them for five years. About half were living with HIV (it was the first hyperthermia trial worldwide to include them) and 79% were unemployed.
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Miss South Africa’s “The Mandate”: Preparing Women Not Just for a Crown, But for Leadership and ResponsibilityAll participants received standard chemoradiotherapy. Half also received modulated electro-hyperthermia, a low-power radiofrequency technique that warms tumour tissue by a few degrees to make it more responsive to radiation and chemotherapy.
Five years after treatment, disease-free survival in the hyperthermia group was more than double that of the control group: 32% against 14%, and the difference was significant. Late side effects did not increase, and quality-of-life scores improved. A cost-effectiveness analysis found an 82.2% probability of cost savings over three years, largely because recurrence and residual disease are expensive to treat. The results were published in the journal Cancers in 2022 and in Frontiers in Oncology in 2025 and were presented internationally in 2024.
By improving disease control without adding treatment-related toxicity, Minnaar says, the adjunct may reduce the clinical and financial burden associated with persistent or recurrent disease later.
She is direct about where hyperthermia does not belong.
“It is an adjunct. It runs alongside chemotherapy and radiation, never instead of them. Anyone offering it as a substitute for those treatments is doing something I will not defend,” she says.
The Foundation intends to install additional treatment units so that access can be widened and research extended to other tumour types.
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