Traditional Treatment

As with any other cancer, your treatment options are surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, immunotherapy, monoclonal antibody therapy or other methods. The choice of therapy depends upon the location and grade of the Mesothelioma and the stage of the disease, as well as the health of the patient. A number of experimental cancer treatments are also under development.

Complete removal of the cancer without damage to the rest of the body is the goal of treatment. Sometimes this can be accomplished by surgery, but cancers spread by invading adjacent tissue or spread to distant sites by microscopic metastasis. So surgery alone is not always effective.

Traditional follow-ups to surgery for Mesothelioma are Chemotherapy, which is toxic to other tissues in the body and Radiation, which can also cause damage to normal tissue.

New Treatments for Mesothelioma

Pemetrexed - brand name Alimta®, is a chemotherapy drug manufactured and marketed by Eli Lilly and Company. Its indications are the treatment of pleural mesothelioma as well as non-small cell lung cancer.

Photodynamic therapy (PDT), matured as a feasible medical technology in the 1980s at several institutions throughout the world, is a three-step treatment for cancer. It uses a photosensitizer, light, and tissue oxygen. It is also being investigated for treatment of psoriasis and acne, and is an approved treatment for wet macular degeneration.

Because Mesothelioma is a cancer and that refers to a class of diseases, it is unlikely that there will ever be a single cure.