May 11, 2011 – Jason Wentworth
A recent Austrian study published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology shows that temsirolimus, a drug used to treat kidney cancer, may improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy for mesothelioma patients.
Mesothelioma is an aggressive form of lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. The cancer has been notoriously resistant to chemotherapy until now. Temsirolimus, which is used to block cell growth for kidney cancer, is showing to be effective in blocking cancer cell growth in mesothelioma, as well. This has the potential to be a major stride in mesothelioma treatment research because it may prove that using these kinds of drugs (mTOR inhibitors) can effectively aid in mesothelioma chemotherapy or be used as a second-line treatment in case chemotherapy fails.
“These results suggest the initiation of clinical trials involving mTOR inhibitors as a novel anti-mesothelioma strategy,” remarked Professor Walter Berger, PhD, of the Institute of Cancer Research at the Medical University of Vienna. “Malignant mesothelioma is a severe human malignancy characterized by a very bad prognosis, with a mean patient survival time of less than one year…novel therapeutic options for this devastative disease are urgently needed.”
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