Novel Treatments & Drugs
Researchers have found that targeting lung fibrosis can help people with mesothelioma. People with mesothelioma usually suffer from fibrosis, which is the stiffening of tissue surrounding tumors. Certain drugs to treat mesothelioma are not very effective because the fibrosis prevents the drugs from penetrating the tumor. It also prevents the immune system from detecting rogue…
Researchers are looking at a new treatment for mesothelioma. It is a multimodal treatment (multiple treatments combined) consisting of the immunotherapy drug Keytruda and a new drug called OT-101. OT-101 is an antisense drug, which is a drug that blocks molecules that make certain proteins. The drug is also effective at treating COVID-19. It blocks…
Results from a new study involving a genetic therapy for pleural mesothelioma have been submitted at the University of Leicester. Researchers at the United Kingdom university designed a treatment to match specific genetic profiles to individual patients. There are promising results from the study, which had patients who received first line chemotherapy combined with either…
Studies show that durvalumab and tremelimumab work very well together while treating mesothelioma. A phase I clinical trial was performed at the Baylor College of Medicine in conjunction with Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center. Durvalumab is an immunotherapy drug known as a PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor. It works by blocking the connection between T-cell receptors and…
Mesothelioma, a cancer of the membrane that surrounds the lungs, abdomen, heart, and testicles is a very aggressive cancer. It spreads very quickly and when the tumors grow big enough, they crowd out organs and make it hard for people to breath. Mesothelioma sufferers can experience coughing, chest pain, and shortness of breath among other…
Researchers are looking into changing mesothelioma cells to make them more susceptible to immunotherapy. Mesothelioma is a hard cancer to treat, so new approaches need to be developed to try to lengthen and improve mesothelioma patients’ lives. Immunotherapy can work well for some, but for others it does very little, so researchers need to find…
The National Cancer Institute just started a study to see if it could make immunotherapy more potent for treating mesothelioma. The study combines a manmade protein that kills cancer cells called LMB-100 and an immunotherapy drug called ipilumab. The problem with current immunotherapy treatments is they do not work well with mesothelioma. The combination of…
A new treatment utilizing CAR-T cell therapy could help prevent mesothelioma cells from protecting themselves. The treatment, called UCARTMESO, is being developed by the French biopharmaceutical company Cellectis. The treatment works by targeting cells that overexpress mesothelin, which is an antigen that prevents cells from sending immune suppressive signals. A majority of the time immune…
A chemical that makes cancer cells more sensitive to radiation could potentially help patients with mesothelioma. Radiotherapy utilizes ionizing radiation to damage the DNA of cancer cells, which affects their ability to reproduce and form tumors. Radiation is not always used for mesothelioma patients because mesothelioma cells can be immune to radiation and it can…
Researchers have potentially found a new way to treat cancer by targeting nerve cells. Researchers at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, conducted the study that is now published in the Science Advances journal. The research targets neurons, which promote tumor growth. The researchers assumed that once tumor nerve cells were targeted with a damaging…
