The Bot Bin

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Mesothelioma Cancer Victims Could Improve from Clinical Trials of New Treatments

Oncologists and other cancer doctors choose what kind of treatment to administer to a patient. There are many options. There are no one size fits all treatment regimen for mesothelioma cancer victims. This is because of the relative rareness of the disease, the high mortality rate and low treatment success rate, and the few scientific studies to provide meaningful statistics.

While prospects for patients with mesothelioma have been bleak, doctors have been making progress. Traditional treatments for cancer are surgery (removing the tumor and surrounding tissue), chemotherapy (poisoning cancerous cells) and radiation (killing cancer cells with radiation) Each one of these methods have problems. Mesothelioma patients treated with traditional radiation therapy have not responded well to it. In hopes to lessen damage to healthy tissue, researches are studying ways to aim radiation right at the tumor.

The mesothelial tissue around the tumor is removed by surgery. It is a grueling surgery with unknown benefits to patients. Most chemotherapy medication that work on other cancers typically do not work on mesothelioma, and combinations of chemotherapy agents have been tried, but without much success. Like radiation, researchers are focusing their work on controlling the physical location of the treatment with an emphasis on the pleural cavity.

The death rate for mesothelioma is so high that many of even the most sophisticated techniques in cancer treatment are tried out on patients. Such treatments include anti-angiogenesis drugs like thalidomide and biologic therapies agent interleukin 2. Pemetrexed (Alimta) is a new drug that has shown results in extending life.

Before acting, oncologists review the stage of mesothelioma, position of the tumor, and age and health status of the patient. Two therapies that are extremely cutting-edge in fighting cancer are called photodynamic and gene therapy. Clinical trials using these techniques are being offered to some of those who have mesothelioma.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under Online Health, Universe Of Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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