Clapper, Patti, Schweizer and Mason

For decades a mesothelioma diagnosis has been a death sentence.  While this preventable form of asbestos cancer is quite rare, with roughly 3,000 people in the United States diagnosed annually, every case is fatal.  Caused by exposure to asbestos, either at the jobsite or at home, mesothelioma is a very aggressive form of cancer that has proven to be resistant to all traditional forms of cancer treatment. 

For far too long, doctors and scientists have tackled mesothelioma as they would other more common forms of cancer and have been stonewalled by this disease.  However a new wave of scientists has begun to attack mesothelioma in interesting ways.  Instead of relying on surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy as generations have done in the past, these doctors are trying to identify what makes mesothelioma cells tick so they can stop them.

Many veins of research have sprung out of this novel approach but one group of Italian researchers thinks that throwing new treatments out there is a haphazard way to combat mesothelioma.

Why?  Because no one is even sure how mesothelioma cells grow, what can keep them from travelling through the body, or what can effectively kill them.  Therefore, this new Italian study was designed to allow researchers and scientist to get a better view of just how this deadly disease occurs, progresses, and can be interfered with. 

The title of the report, “In vitro and in vivo characterization of highly purified human mesothelioma derived cells,” authored by A. Melotti et al. from the University of Genova, gives us a hint at exactly what these novel thinkers are trying to do. 

By developing tumor cell lines that are pure, they hope to be able to better measure mesothelioma cells and their responses to various treatments and therefore weed out contaminants that might confound future attempts at cures or treatments. 

The researchers note that “ . . . all the cell lines established so far were grown in medium containing at least 10% serum, and it has been shown that primary cell lines cultured under these conditions lose their ability to differentiate.” 

The goal, as they put it, "was aimed to establish from fresh human pleural mesothelioma samples cell cultures maintaining tumorigenic properties" thereby giving future researchers a much more accurate and true tool by which to test their potential mesothelioma treatments or cures. 

The results of the Genova study were published in BMC Cancer in late 2010.