Statins may increase effectiveness of chemotherapy drug in mesothelioma treatment
Italian researchers have found that the statin drugs, commonly used to reduce cholesterol, can be a useful adjunct to treatment of mesothelioma wih doxorubicin.
Doxorubicin is one of the workhorses of modern chemotherapy. It’s used in many types of cancer, including mesothelioma, but it’s of limited effectivness in mesothelioma, which is notoriously difficult to treat.
The researchers found that the mevastatin and simvastatin increased the accumulation of doxorubicin in the mesothelioma cells and increased the cytotoxicity of doxorubicin. This might help refine and improve treatment of mesothelioma in the future.
More on statins and cancer.
Bill Carry
August 7, 2006 @ 2:55 am
Your website is really informative, but according to my research at i found the following information that,
Treatment of MM using conventional therapies has not proved successful and patients have a median survival time of 6 - 12 months after presentation. The clinical behaviour of the malignancy is affected by several factors including the continuous mesothelial surface of the pleural cavity which favours local metastasis via exfoliated cells, invasion to underlying tissue and other organs within the pleural cavity, and the extremely long latency period between asbestos exposure and development of the disease.