A drug that is designed to boost the immune system against mesothelioma, when combined with immunotherapy, was found to be beneficial in a small study involving ten patients. The results, which appeared July 1, 2020, in Science Translational Medicine, suggest that the drug LMB-100 could prolong the life of some patients with advanced disease.
Mesothelioma is a rare and hard to treat form of cancer and affects the cells that make up a thin membrane around organs, such as the lungs and heart. To treat this cancer, some drugs have been created that bind to a protein on the surface of these cells, called mesothelin. The hope is to train a patient’s immune system to identify the protein and thus to attack the cancerous cells.