Mesothelioma is not a form of cancer that lends itself to surgical resection. In addition, most diagnoses don’t occur until the disease is in its latter stages. For that reason medical researchers have focused their efforts on extending the period of patient survival after the diagnosis has been made.
These efforts generally focus on slowing or stopping the growth of the cancerous cells. There are a number of approaches to this concept. One chemotherapy drug called cisplatin that is used for mesothelioma treatment has at its core molecules of platinum, which has proven to damage the DNA in certain types of cancer cells, resulting in their inability to reproduce. This sort of targeted chemotherapy does less damage to surrounding healthy cells than some more general formulations of anti-cancer cell agents.
Another chemotherapy drug approved by the FDA for mesothelioma treatment is pemetrexed, a medication that targets enzymes vital to certain types of cancer cells. This is another successful approach to narrowing the focus of chemotherapy and limiting collateral damage; however some mesothelioma cancer cells have shown resistance to pemetrexed.
For that reason, mesothelioma clinical trials have recently been completed that utilize cisplatin and pemetrexed in combination. The result was a significant extension of survival time for many of the participants. Unfortunately, the extension was a period of months rather than years.
Posted in: Mesothelioma
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