Radiation Therapy Do Little to Help those Suffering with Mesothelioma, but Gene Therapy Offers a Promising Alternative
Cancer doctors choose what kind of treatment to go with for each patient. The options are endless. There exists no standard treatment course for malignant mesothelioma patients. Mesotheliomas lack of agreed-upon treatment is due to low a treatment success rate, rareness, a high mortality rate and a small number of studies providing meaningful stats.
Mesothelioma patients have historically had a bleak outlook, but doctors have recently made progress. Customary treatments for cancer are surgery (removing the tumor and the tissue that surrounds it), radiation (killing the cancerous cells with radiation), and chemotherapy (poisoning the cancerous cells.) All three methods have problems. Mesothelioma patients treated with traditional radiation therapy have not responded well to it. In hopes to lessen damage to healthy tissue, researches are studying ways to aim radiation right at the tumor.
Surgery removes the mesothelial tissue around the tumor. The surgery is difficult and challenging, with unknown effects or benefits to patients. The usual chemotherapy cocktails effective on other cancers are not effective on mesothelioma, and combinations of chemotherapy agents have been tried, but without much success. As with radiation, research is going toward controlling the physical location of the treatment with emphasis on the pleural cavity.
The death rate for mesothelioma is so high that many of even the most sophisticated techniques in cancer treatment are tried out on patients. These techniques include a biologic therapy called the agent interleukin 2 and anti-angiogenesis drugs like thalidomide. Pemetrexed (Alimta) is a new drug that has shown results in extending life.
Before acting, oncologists review the stage of mesothelioma, position of the tumor, and age and health status of the patient. Two exotic ways of attacking mesothelioma are gene therapy and photodynamic therapy. Clinical trials using these techniques are being offered to some of those who have mesothelioma.
