Mice Lending Help At Brigham and Women's With Mesothelioma Fight

At the acclaimed Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, it's usually the thoracic surgeons, oncologists or pathologists getting the credit for advancing the fight against malignant mesothelioma. This time, it's the mice. With a rare cancer like mesothelioma, research scientists often don't have enough real test cases to use in their search for better adjuvant therapies, needing subjects who first have had surgery. That's where the lab mice are contributing now. Scientists at Brigham & Women's Hospital have been grafting human mesothelioma cells into the mice, letting them grow, then surgically removing the tumors from the peritoneal cavities, giving them viable test subjects for adjuvant therapies. Before closing the surgical openings, researchers were applying intracavitary chemotherapy, allowing them to evaluate the chemotherapy drug, paclitaxel, using expansile nanoparticles. And what they found was encouraging, something they could not have discovered without the help of the mice. Although paclitaxel has been tested alone as a chemotherapy drug, in both mice and humans, researchers wanted to gauge its effectiveness as part of the multi-modal approach that has become so popular. Malignant mesothelioma cancer stems from an exposure to asbestos and has a particularly poor prognosis, making even the smallest advancements important. "Treatment with Pax-eNP (paclitaxel) improved overall survival in the setting of CRS (cytoreductive surgery), sugg...
Source: Asbestos and Mesothelioma News - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Treatment & Doctors Source Type: news