07.16.09
Genetic Therapies Could Give Promising Mesothelioma Treatments in Comparison to Standard Cancer Treatment
Doctors who specialize in cancer treatment decide what course of treatment to go with for each patient. There are many options. There exists no standard treatment course for malignant mesothelioma sufferers. This is due to the cancers high mortality rate, rareness, low treatment success rate, and small number of studies to provide meaningful statistics.
The prospects for mesothelioma patients have been grim, but doctors have recently made progress. Customary treatments for cancer are surgery (removing the tumor and the tissue that surrounds it), radiation (killing the cancerous cells with radiation), and chemotherapy (poisoning the cancerous cells.) There are problems with all three. Mesothelioma patients treated with traditional radiation therapy have not responded well to it. Researchers are looking for ways of aiming radiation directly at the tumor in hopes that this will result in less damage to healthy tissue.
The mesothelial tissue around the tumor is removed by surgery. 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 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. 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..
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.
