A therapy designed to promote the death of mesothelioma cells by subjecting them to low-intensity, alternating electric fields during chemotherapy is being clinically tested in Europe. The company that developed the therapy, Novocure, announced in February that it had begun enrolling mesothelioma patients into a Phase II clinical trial to test the safety and efficacy
Category Archives: News
When your mesothelioma doctor starts you on chemotherapy, the drug cocktail you take may include pemetrexed. Pemetrexed is a pretty good therapeutic agent but it packs some unpleasant side effects. Now, a research team from Japan appears to have developed a method to make pemetrexed work better against mesothelioma and perhaps with less discomfort. The
Asbestos causes mesothelioma. You know it, your doctor knows it, your government knows it. Yet asbestos has never been fully banned in the U.S. That could change if two senators have their way. On March 12, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced a bill that, among other things, requires the Environmental
If you don’t yet have pleural mesothelioma, the symptom you’re likely to experience first is pain in your chest. But it’s possible you’ll experience pain in your shoulder before you feel it in the region around your lungs. So suggest researchers from Central Clinical Hospital in Warsaw, Poland, who recently found evidence linking shoulder pain
At some point in the future, the mesothelioma therapy your doctor orders for you could have as its molecular target a mitochondrial enzyme known as pyruvate carboxylase. So say researchers from the Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky in Lexington writing in a recent issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Here’s the
Green tea drinkers love that beverage. Mesothelioma cells haven’t yet tasted the brew, but new research out of Penn State University suggests they’re going to hate it once they do. Scientists there discovered that green tea contains a polyphenol compound that kills cancer cells. Specifically, it kills cancer cells when it comes into contact with
One deficiency of existing research that is investigating how mesothelioma responds to various forms of systemic treatment is the failure of most of those studies to tell you which mesothelioma subtypes were tested. Researchers from Mayo Clinic and Levine Cancer Institute Carolinas HealthCare System, Charlotte, North Carolina, have caught onto this shortcoming. In a recent
A two-year government-sponsored asbestos health study begins soon in Australia to reveal just how big a mesothelioma risk it is to live in a home where the attic once contained loose-fill asbestos insulation. The findings should be useful in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. But even without the benefit of such a
When you received your mesothelioma diagnosis, your doctor probably told you the type of cell that makes up the mesothelioma growing inside you — epithelioid, biphasic or sarcomatoid. If your mesothelioma cell type is epithelioid, your doctor may be able to soon offer you a promising new treatment option. It’s a drug already approved by the
Mesothelioma doctors dream of being able to accurately diagnose you without conducting a biopsy. Unfortunately, today’s gold standard for malignant pleural mesothelioma diagnosis is pleural biopsy followed by in-lab histologic analysis of the extracted tissue specimen. Now, however, Pittsburgh researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Allegheny General Hospital, believe they’ve hit on a mesothelioma diagnosis
