Cancer stem cells help your mesothelioma resist chemotherapy and grow back after surgery, but a drug combination now in Phase 1 clinical trials seeks to prove those stem cells can be thwarted. The drug combination brings together the compounds VS-5584 and VS-6063, both discovered and developed by the biotech firm Verastem, Inc. VS-5584 is a
Monthly Archives: January 2015
An analog of the drug naftopidil — used as a prostate hyperplasia and hypertension therapy — appears capable of knocking down pleural mesothelioma cells. Researchers in Japan who made this discovery said that this analog could present a “brilliant hope” for mesothelioma patients. The naftopidil analog goes by the shorthand name of HUHS1015. In full, its name
Scientists think they now know why eating red meat while you have mesothelioma is like tossing gasoline on a fire. It’s because of Neu5Gc — a sugar molecule contained in beef but unnatural in humans. Neu5Gc doesn’t cause mesothelioma, but it apparently helps create the conditions inside your body that encourage mesothelioma to develop and then
Sending a biopsied tissue sample to a lab for evaluation under a tabletop microscope is currently the most reliable way to obtain a mesothelioma diagnosis. But soon there may be a way that’s even better — a miniaturized microscope that inserts right into your body. It offers cancer doctors a direct look at suspicious growths. The
Mesothelioma diagnosis for most patients occurs when the disease is far along, which for them usually means mesothelioma survival isn’t going to extend beyond a few months. So the goal for mesothelioma specialists is to give you a diagnosis as early as possible. Early diagnosis permits treatment at the stage when it’s most effective and
If your mesothelioma doctor offers you a choice between extrapleural pneumonectomy or pleurectomy/decortication for treating your pleural mesothelioma, look to the latter surgery choice. That’s the advice of a trio of mesothelioma doctors writing in the December 2014 issue of the journal Annals of Thoracic Surgery and hoping to end the debate about which surgery
Pouring the active ingredient in vinegar over a mesothelioma tumor has the same effect as pouring salt on a garden slug — it dissolves the mass into a harmless puddle of goo right before your eyes. Research published in the December 2014 issue of the Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology indicates that acetic acid applied directly
The mesothelioma cells inside you are taking over. This is because your innate immune system prefers them over healthy neighboring cells in the life-or-death competition for available growth nutrients. The fact that this competition occurs at all, and that your immune system is involved, means that there is the possibility to detect tumors ever earlier
Chemotherapy is often the first line of attack against mesothelioma, but mesothelioma doctors lament that they don’t have much they can use as a second line of attack. That could change if the drug nintedanib, now in testing, works as hoped. Nintedanib has been used by patients in Europe who suffer from a respiratory disease
