Clinical Trials for Asbestos Related Illnesses

Asbestosis is a rare lung condition. Mesothelioma is a rare lung disease that could arise in asbestosis patients.

Both of these conditions are caused by prolonged exposure to asbestos. It takes anywhere from 20 – 40 years, in some cases, for the symptoms to appear. This makes successful treatment an issue as by the time the symptoms appear, the patients are usually already in the advanced stages of the disease. Because of this, deaths from these conditions have increased recently and are expected to continue to rise until the year of 2020. This would be the appropriate number of years since asbestos use was halted.

To find more effective treatments for these diseases, there are ongoing clinical trials to test new mediations. However, until recently, clinical trials for mesothelioma patients were almost impossible to conduct. The disease was aggressive and the patients had a relatively short survival period when the clinical trial could be conducted. There was also limited knowledge on the exact biology of the disease in order to be able to teat it.
Researchers had to adjust the parameters of what would allow someone with mesothelioma have to have to be qualified to join a clinical trial. There are now a number of new clinical trials underway. We can only hope that there will be some progress made for mesothelioma patients.

Clinical trials are programs where new drugs are being tested for the first time in patients with the targeted conditions. As such, there are four different phases of clinical trial for mesothelioma. (Source FDA)

Phase I - Research and/or treatment is started on a small group of patients of approximately 10-80 patients. The purpose is to evaluate safety, dosage and side effects.

Phase II – Researchers now work with a larger group of patients to determine if the drug is effective, to confirm the dose and to continue to evaluate the side effects.

Phase III – Researchers administer the drug or treatment to a a much larger group of patients. The drug will be compared to other commonly used treatments.

Phase IV – This is done after the drug has been approved and is going to market or has gone to market already and consists of follow-up studies from phase III.

At this time, no drug has been found to be effective in treating mesothelioma. There have a variety of drugs tested in clinical trials including, Platinol, paraplantin, eloxatin, reltitexed, methotrexate and ranpirnase. The response rates for these drugs has been less than 20% and have shown a survival rate of only 6 months.

As clinical trials are ongoing, there could be new treatments and drugs discovered any day. That’s the good news for patients with so little to look forward to.