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  • Home > Blog > For Your Family > Upcoming Symposium on Toxicities of Cancer Treatment May be Useful for Mesothelioma Researchers
Posted on Wednesday, Jan 11, 2012

Upcoming Symposium on Toxicities of Cancer Treatment May be Useful for Mesothelioma Researchers

The Friends of Cancer Research has announced the dates for the Symptoms and Toxicities of Cancer Therapy Symposium.  The symposium will be held April 26-27, 2012, in Houston, Texas at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.  This two-day event may prove beneficial for mesothelioma researchers who have struggled to find a new, effective treatment that does not result in harmful side effects.

The purpose of this symposium “is to provide a forum for researchers, clinicians, advocacy groups, and federal agencies to discuss the state of the science relative to this timely topic and collectively determine common pathways to prevent or reduce the symptoms and toxicities of cancer treatment.”

Mesothelioma is an aggressive cancer of the lining of the lungs and abdomen caused by asbestos exposure. The cancer can be difficult to detect, and extremely difficult to treat.  Chemotherapy is considered the most effective single modality for treatment.  However, chemotherapy is notorious for its side effects including low blood cell counts, diarrhea, nausea and vomiting.  Cisplatin, a popular chemotherapy drug used to treat mesothelioma, is also known to cause kidney damage or failure in about 30 percent of users, according to researchers at the Georgia Health Sciences University.

In several recent trials of new drugs thought to be effective in treating mesothelioma, researchers have had to conduct further, extensive testing due to toxic effects on the patients.   The tests for geldanamycin, an antibiotic for use as an anti-cancer treatment, for example, proved effective against lung cancer, but the drug proved highly toxic leading to liver failure in some cases.

The outcomes of the symposium, according to Friends of Cancer, are:

  • To increase attention to the emerging and current toxicities of therapy and how that limits drug development and treatment dosing, 
  • To increase awareness of, and interest in, the need to move toxicity prevention and control into the NCI clinical trials community, 
  • To determine what is known about the epidemiology of toxicity,
  • To combine knowledge of mechanisms with candidate markers and interventions for toxicity,
  • To develop heightened advocacy for research and to increase the pipeline of agents for toxicity control.

Registration is not yet available for the event.  Watch the Friends of Cancer announcement for more information.