There are very few options available for patients who are diagnosed with malignant pleural mesothelioma. Usually the recommended corse of treatment is surgery. However not all patients fare well after undergoing such procedures.

Surgery in mesothelioma is usually only an option for patients if the disease is in its earliest stages and it rarely possible for surgeons to remove all the cancer from a patient’s body. Often a technique called debulking is attempted, which removes of much as the malignancy as possible in an attempt to prolong the life expectancy. Other surgical options are used to drain the lungs of excessive fluid build up that often affects mesothelioma patients and in some cases the removal of a diseased lung.

Surgical procedures may or may not then be followed by radiation and chemotherapy and often non traditional therapies such as acupuncture and breath training. The survival rate however is still very low.

Raphael Bueno, MD and his colleagues are members of staff at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. They showed through retrospective studies that measuring expression ratios of four genes could effectively determine which patients would benefit from undergoing surgery and which would not, something that could help mesothelioma patients significantly when weighing their various treatment options.

120 patients were studied in connection with Bueno’s research. The patients had been treated at Brigham and Women and had participated in a clinical trial. Researchers used multiple tissue samples from each patient and used several different biopsy techniques and different micro array platforms.

After adjusting for certain clinical factors the tests were able to predict the overall survival rate and the results were consistent whatever test method was utilized. When the researchers combined the gene ratio results with known prognostic factors they were able to separate the patients in the study into two groups – high and low risk. In the high risk group the average survival rate in the high risk group was 6.9 months while it was 31.9 months in the low risk group.

The authors wrote in their conclusion that “Patients whose gene ratio test results predict a good prognosis after surgery may more confidently select the treatment option that includes surgery,”