The Usual Drug Cocktails Ineffective against Mesothelioma
Oncologists determine what kind of treatment to pursue for each patient. There are numerous options. There are no one size fits all treatment option for pleural mesothelioma cancer patients. This is due to the cancers high mortality rate, rareness, low treatment success rate, and small number of studies to provide meaningful statistics.
While prospects for patients with mesothelioma have been bleak, doctors have been making progress. Customary treatments for cancer are surgery (removing the tumor and the tissue that surrounds it), chemotherapy (poisoning cancerous cells) and radiation (killing cancer cells with radiation) There are problems with all three. Patients with mesothelioma have not responded well to traditional radiation therapy. Researchers are looking for ways of aiming radiation directly at the tumor in hopes that this will result in less damage to healthy tissue.
Surgery removes the mesothelial tissue around the tumor. It is a grueling surgery with unknown benefits to patients. Common chemotherapy drugs that work on other types of cancer usually do not work on mesothelioma, and different mixtures of these drugs have not been successful. As with radiation, research is going toward controlling the physical location of the treatment with emphasis on the pleural cavity.
Many advanced techniques in cancer treatment are tried on mesothelioma patients because of its high fatality rate. These include biologic therapy such as the agent interleukin 2 and anti-angiogenesis drugs such as thalidomide. The new drug pemetrexed (brand name Alimta) has shown good results in extending life with mesotheliomas..
Oncologists consider the stage of mesothelioma, the location of the tumor, the patient’s age and state of health at the time. Theres also photodynamic therapy and gene therapy ” two far-out new ways of attacking cancer. Mesothelioma patients sometimes become involved in clinical trials in this area, and see benefits.
