New approaches to treat mesothelioma are under research. It may include traditional treatment or may be completely new. Not only researchers and doctors are trying to find out new ways to treat mesothelioma. With few or no side effects Alternative treatment attacks the mesothelioma cancer quite aggressively. It works by aiming the patient’s immune system to distinguish and destroy the tumor tissue. These methods depend on cancer vaccines to activate patient’s immune system and destroy tumor cells. These methods are often combining with traditional treatments to get entirely new.
Alternative Methods are:
Photodynamic Therapy: PDT is a type of treatment on cancer cells based on single-celled organism, if they are treated with photosensitive drugs, it will die when open to light at a particular frequency. PDT destroys cancerous cells by using this fixed frequency light to activate photosensitizing drugs which have accumulated in body tissues. These photosensitizing drugs are induced inside the body intravenously, after few days drugs get accumulated inside the cancerous cell and get eliminated from the healthy cells. Then these cancerous cells are exposed to laser light which leads to destruction of cancer cells. The major side effects of this treatment are skin sensitivity, nausea and vomiting and eye sensitivity.
Immunotherapy: It is a type of treatment in which the patient's own immune system is 'tricked' into killing cancer cells. There are two main types of immunotherapy: active and passive. In active immunotherapy, mesothelioma cancer cells are removed from a patient and then treated in a laboratory to turn them into a vaccine. Passive immunotherapy is somewhat different in that it does not attempt to activate the patient's immune system. Instead, it uses substances such as cytokines and other agents to help boost the patient's immune response to their cancer.
Gene Therapy: Involves using genetic material to specifically target cancer cells and make them more vulnerable to chemotherapy treatment. When undergoing this type of gene therapy, the patient is treated with a non-infectious virus that has been altered with genetic material that makes them produce a particular protein. Following this procedure, the patient is then treated with a chemotherapeutic medication that is specially formulated to be toxic only to cancer cells. This type of therapy has produced some promising results for mesothelioma patients, but it is still only available through clinical trials.
Anti-angiogenesis Drugs: Anti-angiogenesis is a targeted therapy using drugs or other substances to prevent tumors by stopping the growth of the tumor. Researchers are currently studying both natural and synthetic anti-angiogenesis inhibitors, and although many of these drugs are still available only in clinical trials, the first anti-angiogenesis drug, bevacizumab was developed, for use in the treatment of metastatic colon cancer.