Patients with this disease have a decreased quality of life due to symptoms such as shortness of breath, cough, pain, fatigue, and the inability to eat. One of the scariest parts about this disease is that it can be resistant to most therapies, including surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.

A press release from Alfacell Corporation says that the addition of a drug called Onconase (ranpirnase) to Adriamycin improves survival over Adriamycin alone in patients that have operable mesothelioma. Onconase targets cancer cells while sparing healthy cells. It is taken into the cancerous cell where it kills the cell through various processes. Onconase is not yet proved by the FDA in the United States.

A clinical trial was conducted to evaluate the addition of Onconase to Adriamycin compared to Adriamycin alone. The trial included a total of 143 patients. At one year 47 percent of patients treated with Onconase/Adriamycin were alive compared to 36 percent of patients treated with Adriamycin alone.

The researchers feel that the drug improves outcomes when given with Adriamycin. This trial was a Phase IIIb trial which means it could be up for FDA approval in the near future.

The second article that I read was recently published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. According to the article treatment with Alimta (pemetrixed) with or without Platinol (cisplatin) provides benefit with malignant mesothelioma who have received prior treatment therapies.

This research was focused on recurrent mesothelioma. Optimal treatment strategies that will improve long-term outcomes for patients with recurrent mesothelioma continue to be evaluated. A Phase III trial was conducted to evaluate treatment including Alimta or Alimta/cisplatin. The trial included 187 patients.

Anticancer responses were achieved in 32.5 percent of patients treated with Alimta/cisplatin compared with 5.5 percent for patients treated with Alimta alone.

The researchers conclude that this is a challenging disease. I bring this information in hopes that anyone diagnosed with is disease can have some information to bring to their physicians to discuss further.

Myocet is in its last clinical trial phase prior to FDA review. The trial is enrolling patients to evaluate the investigative chemotherapy agent Myocet (liposomal encapsulated doxorubicin) in addition to standard therapy for HER2-positive breast cancer.

Myocet is a chemotherapy agent that contains the active form of doxorubicin, you might better know it as Adriamycin. This chemotherapy drug is formulated to reduce the side effects associated with Adriamycin. Myocet allows for more of the active drug to be delivered directly to cancer cells, sparing healthy cells from being damaged.

This trial will directly compare the standard option of Herceptin and Taxol to the combination of Myocet, Herceptin and Taxol. Researchers are now enrolling patients with metastatic, HER2-positive breast cancer with a goal in mind to determine if the addition of Myocet to standard therapy can increase response to therapy or regression of cancer.

Among all sorts of news circulating as a result of the recent breast cancer conference in San Antonio, Texas is a report about an international study that has many touting Canadian chemotherapy treatments as the best therapies around -- even better than the commonly-used AC/T cocktail (doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide followed by paclitaxel) .

The winning Canadian drug combinations -- EC/T (epirubicin and cyclophosphamide followed by paclitaxel) and CEF (cyclophosphamide, epirubicin, and fluorouracil) -- are reportedly more effective at preventing breast cancer recurrence than AC/T.

About 2,104 women in Canada and the United States participated in this international study. All had undergone surgery to remove a tumor and were receiving chemotherapy. The women, aged 60 and under, all had cancer that had spread to their lymph nodes, indicating the disease was likely to spread.

The women received one of three treatments -- AC/T, EC/T, or CEF -- and results revealed that for every 100 women who received EC/T or CEF, 10 women would suffer a recurrence. For every 100 women who received AC/T, 15 women would relapse.

The lead researcher of the study says it's too soon to say whether EC/T and CEF are more effective in the long-term. So participants will be followed for some time while researchers will try to make sense of their initial findings. In the meantime, they suspect AC/T will continue to be widely used because of its lesser side effects.

The results of a Phase III clinical trial, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, concluded that Taxotere (docetaxel) plus Cytoxan (cyclophosphamide) resulted in better cancer free survival than the treatment combination of Adriamycin (doxorubicin) and Cytoxan (cyclophosphamide).

Adriamycin and Cytoxan, referred to as the AC chemotherapy regime, has been the gold standard for adjuvant therapy for those patients diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. This study was conducted on more than 1000 women who had Stage I to Stage III disease. Half of the women were given the AC regime and the other half given the Taxotere/Cytoxan (TC) regime.

The results of the study showed that cancer free survival was 86 percent for those treated with TC an 80 percent among women treated with AC. Overall survival was 90 percent among women treated with TC and 87 percent among women treated with AC. Nausea and vomiting were more common among women treated with AC. Muscle and joint pain, edema, and low white blood cell counts accompanied by fever were more common among patients treated with TC.

Anthracyclines are a type of chemotherapy that treat several different types of cancer including (but not limited to) leukemia, lymphomas, breast, uterine, ovarian, and lung cancers. Anthracyclines are technically antibiotics, although their high toxicity precludes their use as such. A major side effect from this type of chemotherapy is that it can lead to heart problems in some patients. The risk for heart problems can remain elevated long after cancer treatment is finished.

Researchers are looking to find ways to lower the risk of patients developing heart problems after treatment without sacrificing the effectiveness of the drugs. They reviewed information from six previously published clinical trials and found that if the infusion of anthracyclines are given slower, over a period of six hour or longer, it appears to reduce the risk of heart problems.

Available anthracyclines include:

• Daunorubicin
• Doxorubicin
• Epirubicin
• Idarubicin
• Mitoxantrone

A study was conducted that shows some promise in slowing tumor growth of prostate cancer cells by adding extract from a mushroom called Phellinus linteus to the drug doxorubicin. This drug is better known as Adriamycin. The findings were reported in the British Journal of Cancer and it suggests that a lower dose of chemotherapy combined with this type of mushroom extract can be as effective as treating prostate cancer with the full dose of doxorubicin.

Prostate cancer is the third most common cancer in men. We know that important drugs have been found in nature and this could potentially be one that can help to treat cancer without all the nasty side effects. It was added that further studies need to be done to understand how this type of mushroom can inhibit cancer growth.