In the near future, don’t think your mesothelioma doctor has lost his or her mind if, midway through a diagnosis exam, he or she casually reaches for a smartphone and tells you to blow on it. Exhaling on a smartphone is how mesothelioma diagnoses might be conducted someday. The device that will make this possible
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A newly issued overview report about peritoneal cancer therapies in development suggests many reasons to be hopeful that a potent treatment for peritoneal mesothelioma is not far away. In fact, the report offers at least 65 such reasons for hope — 65 being the number of drugs currently in the R&D pipeline. The report, prepared by
If you have malignant pleural mesothelioma you run an increased risk of suffering a pulmonary thromboembolism, deep venous thrombosis or myocardial infarction Translation: your mesothelioma could be setting you up for a stroke or heart attack. These potentially life-threatening occurrences all arise from blood clots that form inside your blood vessels. They are classified as
Mesothelioma diagnosis could be as easy as flipping on a light switch. Writing in the journal Annals of Thoracic Cardiovascular Surgery, scientists from Asahikawa Medical University in Hokkaido, Japan, announced they were able to detect pleural lesions by using autofluorescence imaging. Autofluorescence is the spontaneous emission of light that occurs when cells absorb light. According
Scientists have confirmed that vitamin B12 supplements reduce the toxicity of mesothelioma chemotherapy. These same scientists also say vitamin B12 supplementation could someday help predict whether or not a mesothelioma patient slated to undergo platinum-based chemotherapy will experience treatment-induced neutropenia. The scientists are from Britain’s Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton and they talked about these
Good news if you are among the small percentage of mesothelioma patients who carry what’s known as the TRK oncogene. Scientists at the University of Colorado say the TRK oncogene could provide mesothelioma doctors with yet another avenue of attack against the killer disease. The TRK oncogene is a mutation that some people have inside
The scientists who recently unveiled a cellular protease-mediated, graphene-based nanosystem to deliver molecularly-targeted cancer drugs refer to it as a “flying carpet” delivery technique. It might be more accurate to call it a “cruise missile” delivery technique, judging by the decimation it brings to tumors in the landing zone. This new approach isn’t designed specifically
The fact that you need to inhale and exhale could explain why you and your doctor are having little or no luck in stopping mesothelioma from spreading from your chest to other parts of your body. The conventional understanding of how cancer spreads is that tumors travel to distant sites in your body via your
Cancer stem cells help your mesothelioma resist chemotherapy and grow back after surgery, but a drug combination now in Phase 1 clinical trials seeks to prove those stem cells can be thwarted. The drug combination brings together the compounds VS-5584 and VS-6063, both discovered and developed by the biotech firm Verastem, Inc. VS-5584 is a
An analog of the drug naftopidil — used as a prostate hyperplasia and hypertension therapy — appears capable of knocking down pleural mesothelioma cells. Researchers in Japan who made this discovery said that this analog could present a “brilliant hope” for mesothelioma patients. The naftopidil analog goes by the shorthand name of HUHS1015. In full, its name
