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Experimental Treatments
Doctors are now on the brink of offering personalized cancer care. Cancer, no mater what the type, is a disease in which a group of cells show uncontrolled growth and begin to form a tumor. Every tumor has a genetic flaw that is driving that cancer. If we can figure out for each individual tumor what that flaw is, we can match that tumor to effective drugs. Typically, drug treatments are chosen based on where in the body a cancer is found. But increasingly, we have a more sophisticated understanding of genetic changes that occur in cancer, and hand in hand with that knowledge, we now have new and improved targeted drugs.
Soon it may not be out of the ordinary for doctors to screen the tumors of every individual cancer patient. They will be looking both for genetic changes and clues which tell them how to personalize a particular cancer treatment. Even today, some experimental cancer treatments have doctors screening cancers for more than 120 genetic flaws, and it's revealed unexpected targets. For instance, a patient’s colon cancer can now be treated with a new skin cancer drug. With more genetic testing, patients may see that non-typical cancer drugs actually work to fight their cancer.
Other typical experimental mesothelioma treatments include drug therapy, gene therapy, immunotherapy, photodynamic therapy and multimodality therapy.