‘Asbestos Litigation’ Category

A mesothelioma drug that once held promise for patients and their families has failed to live up to everyone’s hope. In a phase II clinical trial, defactinib (VS-6063) proved to be no more effective than a placebo.

Defactnib is manufactured by Verastem, a Boston biopharmaceutical company. Defactnib is designed to attack malignant...

A new mesothelioma treatment center has been launched at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. For decades, thousands of American workers were exposed to asbestos in Baltimore-area steel mills and shipyards. Asbestos exposure is the only established cause of pleural mesothelioma, a painful and aggressive cancer. Each year, 3,000 Americans are diagnosed with...

A new mesothelioma study reveals that patients treated with “trimodality therapy” tend to have better survival rates than othermesothelioma patients.

Trimodality means three methods of mesothelioma treatment combined, rather than just one or two. The three methods most commonly used to treat pleural mesothelioma are:

The study looked at...

By Elihu Inselbuch and Andrew J. Sackett

MEALEY’S Asbestos Bankruptcy Report

Vol. 15, #2, Sept. 2015

On May 21, 2015, the RAND Corporation (‘‘RAND’’) published a report entitled ‘‘Bankruptcy’s Effect on Product Identification in Asbestos Personal...

Italian scientists have developed a statistical model that suggests which patients with pleural mesothelioma are most likely to benefit from surgery. The results of the scientists’ study have been published in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery.

Pleural mesothelioma patients who survive the longest after surgery share the following common factors:

National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers have learned that many mesothelioma patients younger than 40 may experience the disease differently than their older counterparts. Mesothelioma is usually diagnosed in older men who were exposed to asbestos in the workplace. For these patients, mesothelioma traditionally follows a familiar, tragic course.

A Seattle mesothelioma treatment center is now using the Surgery for Mesothelioma After Radiation Therapy (SMART) methodology developed by doctors at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto. In Canada, where the SMART protocol has been studied previously, the percentage of mesothelioma patients with a three-year survival rate has more than doubled, from 32 percent to 72 percent. For...

Aspirin may slow growth of mesothelioma, according to researchers at the University of Hawaii Cancer Center. Aspirin apparently prevents the harmful effects of High-Mobility Group Box 1 (HMGB1), an inflammatory molecule that aids mesothelioma in its growth and progression.

Mesothelioma is a continuing problem around the world just as it is in the United States. Asbestos was completely banned in the United Kingdom more than 15 years ago (something that still has not happened in America). Even so, the UK saw 2,535 new mesothelioma cases in 2012, an annual number that is expected to rise until 2022. As a result, in 2013 the government there instituted a program...

Mesothelioma specialists at the Pacific Mesothelioma Center (PMC), David Geffen School of Medicine UCLA, have long been advocates for using cryoablation to treat mesothelioma tumors that return following surgery. Now PMC researchers reportedly are looking for ways to boost the effectiveness of cryoablation with immunotherapy.