New Treatments for Mesothelioma

Video Transcript

"My name is Dr. Bill Hughson a clinical professor of medicine at The University of California, San Diego and I am the director of The UCSD Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Concerning new treatments for Mesothelioma there is a lot of research going on and in fact if you can go to the National Cancer Institute website you can click on various places and find clinical trials that are ongoing. For example for chemotherapy we are looking at new drugs and we are also looking at new combinations of drugs. One thing we have learned over the last 20 years is that cancer is a highly devious disease and that cancer cells will contrive to avoid being killed by a single drug so almost always now we treat with multiple drug regimens. Some centers now have surgery, will do what is called intrapleural or intraperitoneal heated chemotherapy. The surgeons have gone in, they have resected what they can and then prior to finishing the operation they instill heated mediations into the body cavity and leave it there for a while to give a very high dose directly to the cancer and that seems to help. Gene therapy is something that we all hear about every day. We are trying to understand the genetics of Mesothelioma. If we can just discover the one vulnerability or the pattern of vulnerabilities for Mesothelioma perhaps we can develop strategies with gene therapy that can improve survival. Probably the other exciting area is immunotherapy. Cancer cells are different from normal cells and with or without special treatments you can make the body understand that this tumor does not belong here and try to provoke the body's immune system to attack and kill the cancer and once again these are all sort of in the early stages, certainly years away, probably years away from a common application to patients with Mesothelioma but things are progressing. I think we have a better understanding, certainly the surgical centers have gotten a lot better. Ten years ago the morality rate was very high and nowadays most patients survive the operation and leave the hospital."