Remembering Paul Gleason
- Actor Paul Gleason passed away in 2006 at 67-years-old due to a battle with mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer.
- Mesothelioma is often caused by exposure to asbestos; Gleason’s family says the actor was exposed to asbestos while working at a building company as a teenager.
- In 2019 the FDA approved NovoCure's NovoTTF-100L System, which is a wearable medical device about the size of a backpack that uses electric fields to disrupt solid tumor cancer cell division. Immunotherapy advances have also been made.
Gleason died in May 2006 at the age of 67 due to mesothelioma. This rare type of lung cancer comes in the form of a tumor that is caused by exposure to asbestos (a silicate mineral). After his death, Gleason’s family claimed that the actor was exposed to different forms of asbestos during his childhood while he worked as a construction worker during his teenage years. This tumor can appear in the lungs, stomach, heart or other organs, and is considered an extremely rare form of the disease. According to the American Cancer Society, about 3,000 new cases are diagnosed each year.
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Immunotherapy
Treatments for mesothelioma have been slow over the years, but now there are a few options for those facing the disease. In October 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new first-line mesothelioma treatment called Opdivo-Yervoy Drug Therapy, which combines two immunotherapy drugs Opdivo (nivolumab) and Yervoy (ipilimumab) to help destroy cancerous cells. While evaluating results of this therapy, researchers found that these two drugs may be able to limit tumor growth by increasing the function of patients’ T-cells.
In a clinical trial, patients diagnosed with mesothelioma were divided into two groups where one set of patients received only chemotherapy while the others received the combination of drugs. According to results, patients who received by Opdivo and Yervoy survived an average of 18.1 months after diagnosis while the patients who received chemotherapy alone survived only 14.1 months.
NovoCure’s System
In 2019, the FDA approved NovoCure's NovoTTF-100L System, which is a wearable medical device about the size of a backpack that uses electric fields to disrupt solid tumor cancer cell division. This development marked the first treatment to be approved for mesothelioma in the last 15 years.
Before the NovoTTF-100L approval, the only FDA-approved therapy for patients with these types of mesothelioma was a combination of chemotherapy drugs called pemetrexed and cisplatin. The new NovoCure system will also have to be used in combination with chemotherapy. While testing this treatment, researchers found that median survival rate for people treated with the new system plus chemotherapy was 18.2 months. However, it's important to note that only 80 people participated in the trial.
“Typically, mesothelioma patients who cannot have surgery receive palliative care to mitigate their symptoms,” Mary Hesdorffer, executive director of the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation, previously told SurvivorNet. “NovoTTF-100L provides unresectable (malignant pleural mesothelioma) patients with a treatment option that may improve survival. We are encouraged by the FDA approval and hope it is just the beginning of innovation in the treatment of this aggressive disease."
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