New Staging System

One of the most significant contributions to the field of mesothelioma research and patient care is the development of a new staging system.  This is a collaborative effort among IMIG, the International Association for the study of Lung Cancer (IALSC) with partial funding by the Meso Foundation.  To characterize which patients will benefit from what type of surgery, what patients should be grouped together for clinical trials and to better understand the biology of mesothelioma, an enormous data collection is now taking place and will be stored in an international database.

The buzz word recently has been “personalized medicine” and this international database, once collected and analyzed, will lead to the implementation of personalized medicine for mesothelioma patients.  This database, through a combination of accurate medical, surgical and pathological data, will yield the most important advances for our patient population and will have protections built-in to avoid any risk of violation of privacy. On the other hand, a patient-based database project, which we had initially considered and studied through our SAB, will not be pursued, as it has been deemed to have no scientific value and not serve the interests of current and future patients and might prove vulnerable for subpoena in litigation cases.

~Mary Hesdorffer, NP