Gene Therapy

Mesothelioma gene therapy is a new type of mesothelioma treatment that combats the rare asbestos cancer by inserting foreign genes into cells and tissue with the goal of correcting the disease at the DNA level. For example, someone with a hereditary disease who is missing a tumor suppressor gene can undergo gene therapy treatments to replace the missing gene and potentially correct the abnormality (this is known as replacement gene therapy).

Two basic types of gene therapy are being tested:

• Replacement gene therapy: Replacing defective genes with a normal copy.
• Knockout gene therapy: Targeting genes that induce abnormal behavior and rendering them inactive.

There are a number of new mesothelioma gene therapies being researched. Some doctors and researchers are now calling this type of treatment "molecular therapy," which is a more general term including research into:

• Oncogenes
• Tumor suppressor genes
• Gene therapy and repair genes

By studying how changes in these genes cause normal cells to become cancerous, scientists hope to develop gene therapy treatments whereby damaged genes in the cancer cells can be replaced with normal ones, essentially terminating the disease.

The main focus of mesothelioma gene therapy research involves injecting a virus that has been modified in a laboratory. The virus is injected into the pleural space of the chest, where mesothelioma most commonly develops. The idea is that the virus infects the mesothelioma cells with a certain gene. This gene makes the cancer sensitive to a specific drug that is capable of killing off the mesothelioma cells. Without the aid of the virus carrying this gene into the mesothelioma cells, the drug would not be capable of killing them. Much mesothelioma gene therapy research is still centered on how to get the virus into the cancer cells reliably. Scientists predict it will take years before mesothelioma gene therapy will develop into a practical mesothelioma treatment.