Overall Survival
There are some good results coming from a German study looking at Pleurectomy and Decortication surgery (P/D) being combined with HITHOC. Pleurectomy surgery is surgery that removes mesothelioma tumors but leaves the lung intact while HITHOC is a method of adding heated chemotherapy to the pleural area, sparing the rest of the body. When used…
Tumor Treating Fields were approved for treating mesothelioma, and while they are effective, researchers want to make them more effective for the cancer. A researcher at the Humanitas University in Milan is studying different drug combinations to use with Tumor Treating Fields. The goal is to find a drug that has a synergistic effect with…
Researchers at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center are experimenting with a combination of CAR-T cell therapy and Keytruda, a PD-1 blocker for the treatment of pleural mesothelioma. This is the first time that these two therapies have been combined. The results were recently published in Cancer Discovery. Mesothelioma is an aggressive cancer of the…
Doctors could soon pick the best surgery for pleural mesothelioma patients because of a new predictive model created by Harvard researchers. There are different types of mesothelioma surgery: one involves removing a lung while the other leaves the lungs. The best surgery for each individual patient depends on the person’s demographics, symptoms, and lab values.…
Adjuvant radiotherapy might not be the best treatment for mesothelioma sufferers because researchers at Duke and Stanford found that this therapy does not help patients live longer. The researchers analyzed a database of pleural mesothelioma patients at Duke and a national registry of patients. The research looked at the outcomes of patients with radiation after…
A study looking at many patients with pleural mesothelioma found that there is not enough of a survival advantage to support the use of extrapleural pneumonectomy surgery (EPP). The study was done at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas. EPP is the most aggressive surgery for mesothelioma and at one point…
Unfortunately for mesothelioma patients with high levels of the PD-L1 protein, they have a worse overall survival compared to patients who have lower levels. A European study looking at 200 patients wanted to see if PD-L1 and PD-1, popular targets for immunotherapy drugs, impact survival independently without immunotherapy drugs present. The researchers found that the…
Japanese researchers have found that the main two types of surgery for mesothelioma have similar risks of death. The surgeries either remove the diseased lung lining and one of the lungs or just the lining. Doctors do not agree what surgery is best for mesothelioma patients, but both surgeries have their benefits and drawbacks. When…
An Italian study has found that the combination of two immunotherapy drugs can create a long-term survival in mesothelioma patients. The two drugs, tremelimumab and durvalumab, were just given orphan drug status to treat liver cancer in the last year. The best results in the mesothelioma study were seen in patients with a high level…
A new clinical trial involving durvalumab should be closely monitored by the Food and Drug Administration. The phase III clinical trial is being performed in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Ann Arbor as well as places in New Zealand and Australia. The randomized trial is known as DREAM3R. It wants to figure out if overall survival improves…
