Mesothelioma Patient Cancer-Free Five Years After Innovative Treatment
5 years ago, Karen Grant was facing almost certain death when she was diagnosed with mesothelioma – a rare, incurable cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. Grant was 29-years-old and was given only months to live. She turned to Dr. David Sugarbaker, Chief, Division of Thoracic Surgery, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and now she is cancer-free and she says “I owe my life to him.”
Often called “asbestos cancer,” mesothelioma is highly aggressive and is resistant to many standard cancer treatments. Symptoms of mesothelioma may not appear until up to 50 years after initial exposure to asbestos, however, after symptoms become apparent, mesothelioma may rapidly progress to cause life-threatening complications. Although there is no cure for mesothelioma, it can be treated with varying degrees of success through the use of surgical procedures, chemotherapy and radiation.
Malignant pleural mesothelioma has been a central focus of Dr. Sugarbaker’s clinical and laboratory research, and he innovated and has led the way in a trimodal treatment approach for patients. The treatment consists of the radical extrapleural pneumonectomy surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation.
For Grant, Sugarbaker performed two major surgeries to remove the tumors that lined both lungs, used a laser technique to kill the cancer cells too small to be detected, and bathed her lungs with hot chemotherapy. Grant then underwent months of chemotherapy and rehabilitation.
Grant’s lung scans continue to come up clear and 5-years of no recurrence is a “huge benchmark,” according to Dr. Pasi Janne Medical Oncologist of the Dana-Farber Institute and Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
Grant helps other mesothelioma patients by telling them that mesothelioma “is a grim diagnosis but there is hope out there.” Sugarbaker adds, “the fact that it [remission] can happen in someone is where hope begins.”
