Doctor Attitude Keeps Some Patient from Mesothelioma Chemotherapy
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Doctor Attitude Keeps Some Patient from Mesothelioma Chemotherapy

ByAlex Strauss

A new study suggests that some patients are missing out on chemotherapy for mesothelioma because their doctors do not believe it will work. Doctor “nihilism” – the idea that life is meaningless anyway – was the top reason that 20+ percent of pleural mesothelioma patients did not get the care that might have helped them. In other cases, patients were simply never referred to a cancer doctor who could prescribe chemotherapy for mesothelioma. Doctor Attitudes and Chemotherapy for Mesothelioma The Australian study is based on surveys with 107 doctors and 19 nurses. Most respondents were either lung specialists or cancer doctors. They completed the surveys in 2014. The surveys show that most of the doctors (90%) think at least one…

Combination Therapy with Mesothelioma Surgery Leads to Longer Survival
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Combination Therapy with Mesothelioma Surgery Leads to Longer Survival

ByAlex Strauss

A new study finds almost a quarter of people who had combination therapy with mesothelioma surgery were still alive five years later. The study was published in the European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery. Researchers at University Hospitals KU Leuven in Belgium studied nearly 200 mesothelioma patients from 2003 to 2014. Many people do not live beyond about 18 months after a mesothelioma diagnosis. But the Belgian team says, for the right patients, there is a way to improve the odds. They say combination therapy with radical mesothelioma surgery offers a 1 in 4 chance of surviving for 5 years or more. Two Types of Mesothelioma Surgery There are two major schools of thought about mesothelioma surgery. Some surgeons say it…

Best Tools for Measuring Mesothelioma Treatment Response
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Best Tools for Measuring Mesothelioma Treatment Response

ByAlex Strauss

When it comes to evaluating treatment response in mesothelioma, functional imaging techniques may do a better job than standard imaging. That is the word from a team of UK researchers who compared different types of imaging techniques in the evaluation of pleural mesothelioma patients for an article in the journal Lung Cancer. Imaging Techniques for Mesothelioma Tumors Functional imaging, which includes techniques like positron emission tomography (PET), dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI, and diffusion-weighted MRI, are designed to tell doctors more than just the size or shape of the mesothelioma tumor. By using certain kinds of injectable tracers, these imaging studies reveal important information about cellular processes like metabolism, which is typically higher in mesothelioma cells than it is in normal cells. “By…

Ape Virus Shrinks Mesothelioma Tumors in Lab
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Ape Virus Shrinks Mesothelioma Tumors in Lab

ByAlex Strauss

A virus that causes leukemia in gibbon apes may have the power to help fight malignant mesothelioma in people. Gibbon ape leukemia virus (GALV) has been tested for years as a viral vector, a carrier of therapeutic genetic information, in the treatment of various human illnesses, including cancer. A new study in Japan compared GALV with a leukemia virus derived from mice to see which carrier communicated most efficiently with mesothelioma cells. While both types of viruses replicated in most of the mesothelioma cell lines tested, the mouse-derived virus was not effective in a mesothelioma cell line called ACC-MESO-1. In this cell line, only the GALV spread efficiently both in culture and in mice that had been given human mesothelioma…

Common Cold Virus – Uncommon Mesothelioma Treatment
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Common Cold Virus – Uncommon Mesothelioma Treatment

ByAlex Strauss

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are fighting malignant mesothelioma with an unexpected tool – the cold virus. The approach fits into a category of treatment known as immunotherapy, which aims to harness the body’s own immune system to find and attack cancer cells. In the current study, Penn Medicine mesothelioma researchers, led by Steven Albelda, MD, and Daniel Sterman, MD, of the Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Division, injected mesothelioma patients with a modified form of the adenovirus – a virus normally associated with the common cold. The virus had been altered to express high levels of an immune system stimulant called Interferon-a, a protein that can boost the body’s ability to fight off viral infection. Nine mesothelioma patients…