You and your mesothelioma doctor have been discussing the ins and outs of extended pleurectomy and decortication surgery. You like what this mesothelioma lung-sparing procedure offers. But the big question in your mind is how much extra time will it buy? Your doctor can’t give you a definitive answer. The surgery could extend your mesothelioma
Monthly Archives: January 2016
The effort to develop a mesothelioma diagnostic tool that detects the cancer by analyzing breath samples is continuing and making impressive strides. Indeed, at the rate it’s going, the dream of simple, reliable, in-home diagnosis of mesothelioma could become a reality in the next five years or less. The latest gains on this front come
There’s good cholesterol and there’s bad cholesterol. But when it comes to malignant pleural mesothelioma, cholesterol is good only when it’s bad. Bad for the mesothelioma, that is. And the way it becomes bad for mesothelioma is by not being there at all. That’s what a team of scientists have determined in their experiments with
Two pharmaceuticals companies jointly testing a novel mesothelioma therapy are looking for 30 mesothelioma patients to join an early stage clinical trial now underway. The companies are Five Prime Therapeutics Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline. The mesothelioma therapy being investigated is a protein-based, fibroblast growth factor (FGF) ligand trap called FP-1039. FP-1039 — which also goes by the
You have a better chance of extending your survival after mesothelioma strikes if the disease is diagnosed early — and reliably. But that’s easier said than done because mesothelioma often defies early and sure diagnosis. The reason is that mesothelioma looks a lot like a number of other cancers. When mesothelioma is mistaken for some other
A new mesothelioma drug is being studied to see how effective it is at counteracting your natural resistance to chemotherapy. The drug is called methoxyamine. It’s a novel, clinical-stage small molecule inhibitor of the DNA base excision repair pathway. This pathway causes resistance to alkylating and antimetabolite chemotherapeutics — agents such as pemetrexed and cisplatin. The
Malignant pleural mesothelioma affects men and women differently. One group of scientists now thinks there are many factors to explain this distinction, not just a few. The researchers believe this understanding will be important to unlocking more of the mysteries of mesothelioma at the molecular level. And that’s important because it is at the molecular
Mesothelioma research usually takes a backseat to other cancer research because mesothelioma is so rare. The fact that there are far fewer cases of mesothelioma than other cancers, such as breast cancer, means fewer dollars are designated to fund research into mesothelioma. But comparatively fewer cases of mesothelioma also means there are fewer mesothelioma tumor
