Nationwide mesothelioma research has dodged a bullet thanks to a federal agency decision to keep a vital mesothelioma tissue-lending program fully funded for the next two years. The National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank for Translational Research was facing closure due to a government budget cut. But the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety in June
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You need to be exposed to asbestos just once to find yourself at risk for developing mesothelioma. And new research suggests the mesothelioma risk created by that single exposure actually grows over time. Appearing in the May 19 edition of the journal Thorax, the findings indicate that the risk for pleural mesothelioma keeps rising for
Ask any five peritoneal mesothelioma patients whether they were treated with surgery and the odds are that three of them will say “no.” That’s unfortunate, say the authors of a recently published study in the journal Annals of Surgical Oncology, who reached the conclusion that more peritoneal mesothelioma patients should probably be treated surgically. Surgery,
A novel therapeutic that kills mesothelioma cells by cutting off their blood supply was found in phase-three clinical testing to extend survival, but not for all patients. Fewer than half the patients benefitted from taking NGR-hTNF, the new drug from pharmaceutical company MolMed in Milan, Italy. MolMed scientists had hoped NGR-hTNF would extend survival rates
Your mesothelioma doctor may soon be monitoring the success of the peritoneal mesothelioma treatments ordered for you by using a PET imager instead of a CT or MRI, which are more familiar tools. PET — positron emission tomography — appears to be right up there with CT and MRI when it comes to locating and characterizing peritoneal
Researchers from Japan’s Toyo University now have evidence that a type of vitamin E can shrink mesothelioma tumors. This occurs through disruption of an essential growth process of the individual cells making up those cancerous tissue masses. The scientists looked at how effectively the vitamin E offshoot could interfere with production and release of the
Women develop pleural mesothelioma at rates nowhere close to the rates at which men are stricken. Yet when treated for it they stand a chance three times better than men to hit the five-year survival mark. So says a research team that looked into 14,228 cases of pleural mesothelioma. The study was published in June
An innovative vaccine plus chemotherapy delivers a one-two punch that appears potentially capable of laying mesothelioma out cold. Not yet known is whether the treatment strategy can keep the cancer down for the count. Still, the mesothelioma patients on whom it was tested looked a lot like champs — a crown they each might hold onto
A mesothelioma specialist would give anything for a highly accurate diagnostic tool, one that leaves no doubt about the condition it detects — and that tells how much time remains before the cancer takes its toll. Such a tool may be just around the corner, if findings by researchers from Copenhagen University in Denmark prove out.
Mesothelioma in its advanced stages often proves unresponsive to treatment. But researchers now believe they’ve hit on yet another way to attack the cancer late in the game. The new approach involves genetically modifying immune-system cells so that they seek out and destroy cells harboring the protein mesothelin. Cells that harbor the most mesothelin are
