chemotherapy

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    Mesothelioma Chemotherapy: Can Supplements Make it Safer?

    ByAlex Strauss

    Vitamin B12 and folic acid supplements are often given to mesothelioma patients who are on chemotherapy in an effort to ward off neutropenia, a dangerous drop in white blood cells that can leave patients vulnerable to infection. Neutropenia has been linked to elevated levels of an amino acid called homocysteine, and pemetrexed can raise homocysteine. While some studies have found that supplementation makes chemotherapy less toxic, a team of British doctors found the supplements had little impact on a group of mesothelioma patients who were not on pemetrexed. Scientists at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, UK randomly assigned 83 patients with advanced lung cancer or malignant mesothelioma to receive platinum-based chemotherapy with or without B12 and folic acid supplementation. They were looking…

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    Mesothelioma Chemotherapy Side-Effect Mimics Scleroderma, Infection

    ByAlex Strauss

    The antifolate pemetrexed (Alimta) is the first and is only drug approved by the FDA specifically to treat malignant mesothelioma, the aggressive cancer most closely associated with asbestos exposure.  A combination of pemetrexed and a platinum-based drug like cisplatin or carboplatin is the first-line treatment for most mesothelioma patients. But, like every drug, pemetrexed carries the potential for side effects. Researchers at Perigueux Hospital in Perigueux, France have just published a paper warning of a serious but little-known skin-related side effect of pemetrexed that may be unrecognized by mesothelioma patients and doctors. The report, published in a French dermatology journal, details the cases of two cancer patients on pemetrexed who developed a serious skin problem with symptoms resembling the connective…

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    Chemotherapy May be Underutilized for Mesothelioma

    ByAlex Strauss

    Doctors from the Asbestos Diseases Research Institute and Sydney Medical School reached their conclusions by comparing data on mesothelioma patients and their tumor characteristics with evidence-based mesothelioma treatment guidelines. They used special “decision analysis software” to calculate what they say is the optimal utilization rate for chemotherapy in mesothelioma. “Chemotherapy is recommended at least once during the disease trajectory in 65% of malignant pleural mesothelioma patients,” writes author Stephen Chuan-Hao Kao. According to Dr. Kao and his colleagues, that optimal rate is relatively close to what is being done for mesothelioma patients in Canada where 61% of patients got chemotherapy between 2003 and 2005 and in Australia where the rate was 54% between 2007 and 2009. Unfortunately, the Australian study…

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    Rare Mesothelioma Subtype Less Likely to Respond to Treatment

    ByAlex Strauss

    A new meta-analysis confirms that people with the sarcomatoid type of mesothelioma are less likely to respond to systemic chemotherapy than are people with other histological subtypes. Citing a lack of research on the responsiveness of different types of mesothelioma, scientists with the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte, NC reviewed the medical literature for any studies that broke down responses by histological subtype. Of the 544 studies analyzed, 30 included sarcomatoid mesothelioma patients and met the trial criteria that patients be treated only with chemotherapy. The selected studies included a total of 1,475 mesothelioma patients. Sixty-eight percent of patients (1,011) had the epithelioid variety of mesothelioma, the most common type. Just over 13 percent…

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    New Mesothelioma Treatment Boosts Chemotherapy Response

    ByAlex Strauss

    An important new study from one of the country’s top mesothelioma research labs has found a way to significantly boost the impact of chemotherapy on mesothelioma patients who are not eligible for surgery. Dr. Raffit Hassan and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute have been focusing their efforts on an immunotoxin – a potent toxin inked to an antibody – to selectively target mesothelioma cells. The immunotoxin, called SS1P, is designed to target a protein called mesothelin, which is overexpressed in mesothelioma cells. While previous studies have shown some promise in SS1P treatment by itself, especially when the immune system is suppressed, the newest study tests the value of SS1P in combination with the most popular mesothelioma chemotherapy drugs,…

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    Platinum Drug Beats Antibiotic for Peritoneal Mesothelioma Treatment

    ByAlex Strauss

    A team of surgeons in Nebraska have determined what they say is the best chemotherapy drug to pair with surgery in patients with peritoneal mesothelioma. Peritoneal mesothelioma is a rare form of the asbestos cancer that affects the lining of the abdomen. A treatment approach that involves removing as much of the cancer as possible with cytoreductive surgery (CRS) and then rinsing the abdomen with heated chemotherapy drugs (HIPEC) seems to produce better outcomes than systemic chemotherapy. But there is debate over the best drug to use in CRS/HIPEC treatment. Surgeons at Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha conducted a retrospective study of peritoneal mesothelioma patients that spanned from 2003 to 2010. A total of 44 patients were treated with…

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    Trial Drug May Boost Mesothelioma Chemotherapy Success

    ByAlex Strauss

    There’s more evidence that experimental mesothelioma drugs that inhibit focal adhesion kinase (FAK) may have the ability to dramatically improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy for thousands of mesothelioma patients. Verastem, Inc., the developer of the FAK inhibitors VS-6063 and VS-4718, has just published a new paper on the mechanism by which these drugs work in the medical journal Science Translational Medicine. The research describes how FAK inhibitors make certain mesothelioma cells more susceptible to common chemotherapy drugs like Alimta (pemetrexed) and cisplatin. About half of mesothelioma patients are missing a tumor suppressor called merlin, which can be both good and bad news. Unfortunately, cancers that demonstrate merlin loss tend to be particularly aggressive and mesothelioma is known for its aggressiveness….

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    Radical Surgery Outcomes Better in Women

    ByAlex Strauss

    Women with epithelial mesothelioma who receive induction chemotherapy prior to surgery have the highest chance of benefitting from the radical surgical approach known as extrapleural pneumonectomy (EPP). That is the conclusion reached by a team of thoracic surgeons from nine Italian medical centers. The team collected outcome and survival data on 518 malignant pleural mesothelioma patients who underwent lung-removing extrapleural pneumonectomy (EPP) surgery between 2000 and 2010. Most of the patients in the study (84.4%) had the epithelial variety of mesothelioma, the most common subtype of pleural mesothelioma. A little over half of the study subjects had chemotherapy prior to their surgery. Known as induction or neoadjuvant chemotherapy, the goal of this treatment is to shrink mesothelioma tumors to improve…

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    Using Genes to Predict Mesothelioma Chemotherapy Response

    ByAlex Strauss

    British genetic researchers say a mesothelioma patient’s genes can influence their response to chemotherapy and the knowledge may open the door for more individualized and successful mesothelioma treatments. The team from Guy’s Hospital and St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, focused on polymorphisms, genetic variations that can impact patients’ tolerance to Alimta- (pemetrexed) based chemotherapy. The combination of Alimta and a platinum derivative like cisplatin is currently the most popular first-line treatment for pleural mesothelioma. Using a genetic test called the Illumina Human Exome v 1.1 BeadChip, the researchers compared 28 polymorphisms on 11 key genes with clinical outcomes in patients with either non-small cell lung cancer or mesothelioma. All of the 136 study subjects were receiving combination chemotherapy with Alimta…

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    Biomarker May Predict Chemotherapy Response in Mesothelioma

    ByAlex Strauss

    Cancer researchers in Japan say they may have found a way to help predict which mesothelioma patients are most likely to respond well to treatment with Alimta. Alimta (pemetrexed) was FDA approved in 2004 for the treatment of mesothelioma, a virulent form of lung cancer linked to asbestos exposure. Alimta is often administered along with the platinum-based drug cisplatin, although this first-line mesothelioma treatment combination has been shown to have only limited success. Part of the problem is that it is difficult to predict which mesothelioma patients will respond to which types of therapies. Mesothelioma treatment, therefore, often involves a process of trial and error to find the therapy that works best. Unfortunately, this approach can cost patients valuable time…