Transgenic Mice Help Find Cure for MesotheliomaClose to three thousand deaths a year in the United States are due to mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. The average median survival from time of diagnosis is less than a year. Yet to date, there are no really effective treatments and no known cure. Therefore, research into the disease and potential palliative as well as curative treatments for mesothelioma is imperative.
One challenge in researching the disease is finding a large enough population base to participate in clinical trials. This is not only due to the number of people diagnosed each year is relatively small compared to other diseases, but also because mesothelioma has a long latency period. Symptoms of mesothelioma do not even begin to appear until anywhere from ten to fifty years after initial exposure.
Therefore, researchers are in need of animal models that replicate human mesothelioma in order to try out alternative treatment protocols that may provide better results than what is currently available. Medical researchers from the University of Western Australia recently discovered a mouse model that does just that.
In conjunction with the National Center for Asbestos Related Diseases, investigators from the University found that MexTAg mice, when exposed to asbestos, developed mesothelioma and responded to treatments just as humans do. This suggests that this form of transgenic mice could be used to not only study the mechanisms of the disease (such as differences in development in genders and age groups), but also test out new drug treatments for toxicity, doses, and efficacy for prevention and a cure.
This is good news to those who are developing new chemopreventative therapies and need viable, reproducible models to investigate which drugs and what kind of administration is more beneficial for slowing cancer progression and improving survival rates.
Perhaps with a reproducible model, researchers may discover a cure for mesothelioma that could be used not only to treat but to prevent populations with known asbestos exposure history. To find out further information about this study, read Mouse Model Shows Potential for Finding Cure for Mesothelioma.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 at 9:42 am and is filed under Mesothelioma Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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