A diagnosis of mesothelioma is difficult to handle. Many people associate this horrible disease with death, and that’s often what happens. It can be hard for people who receive this diagnosis to fully enjoy their remaining day; however, making memories with their family members is often a priority.
New treatments for this disease haven’t been forthcoming, which means that patients diagnosed with it have been forced to accept that there wasn’t much hope if surgery and the single treatment option that was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration weren’t successful in curbing the spread of the disease.
Desperate Need for New Options
The five-year survival rate for individuals diagnosed with advanced-stage malignant pleural mesothelioma is 10%. Those aren’t good odds for these individuals, so there is a desperate need to find new treatments that can prolong the survival rate while still enabling the patients to have a decent quality of life.
Patients who have pleural mesothelioma face a tough road. This form of mesothelioma impacts the lungs. When you review the symptoms of this disease, you can fully understand why living with it is so difficult. These symptoms include:
- Weight loss that’s unexpected and unexplained
- Coughing that’s very painful
- Chest pain
- Shortness of breath
- Lumps of tissue under the chest skin
New Drug Combination Approval
On October 2, 2020, the FDA made the first approval for a tandem drug combination to treat mesothelioma. The drug combination is Opdivo and Yervoy, which are the brand name versions of nivolumab and ipilimumab, respectively. This is the first approval of a first-line treatment for this condition in 16 years.
The tandem drug combination is approved for the use in patients who have pleural mesothelioma and who aren’t eligible for resecting. This is an immunotherapy treatment, and it has shown to be effective in improving the survival rates of individuals who have malignant pleural mesothelioma.
The only other treatment that’s FDA approved is a combination of cisplatin and pemetrexed. That was approved in 2004. The professionals at the Mesothelioma Justice Network know that it’s an atrocity that it took 16 years to gain a new approval for a suitable treatment.
The primary risk factor of mesothelioma is exposure to asbestos, but this doesn’t mean that the disease occurs quickly. In some cases, mesothelioma can take upwards of 20 to 60 years after the exposure to manifest. This means that even though asbestos has been largely removed from circulation in the United States, individuals are still being diagnosed on a regular basis.
