New Hope For Mesothelioma Patients
There is new promising data available which demonstrates the efficacy of using so called dendritic cell based immunotherapy in treating mesothelioma patients. The goal of the research that is being conducted in the Netherlands is to develop an effective vaccination that could be administered to people who have been exposed to asbestos, but haven’t gotten sick, yet. Mesothelioma is a cancerous asbestos induced disease which is incurable. This form of cancer affects the lung and the abdomen and as the disease progresses, it spreads further to other parts in the body.
The use of asbestos products has been restricted. However, new mesothelioma diagnoses are still on the rise which is due to the extraordinarily long latency period of the illness. It can take up to 50 years between the first contact with asbestos and the time a patient exhibits the first symptoms. The currently available treatments, mainly chemotherapies, can be effective in extending a patient’s life, but can’t cure the disease. Therefore, patients on average, live only for another year after they got diagnosed.
The new method mentioned earlier is basically founded in strengthening the body’s immune system. The goal is to develop defense mechanisms that target and destroy the cancer cells as they start to develop. The study, which is the first of its kind, runs in 10 humans diagnosed with mesothelioma.
The researches reported that the patients, who have received the vaccination already, tolerated it well, with no severe side effects. The tumors of the ten patients began to shrink after they had received the third injection. However, further research is necessary to gather more conclusive results. The size of the study was too small to get overly excited at this point. However, mesothelioma patients can be cautiously optimistic that this could potentially lead into a major milestone development in the fight against asbestos induced diseases.