Chemotherapy: Single Agent
Mesothelioma has a high resistance to drugs. In the same way that the least effective treatments have been those that followed a single pathway chemotherapy treatments that are dependent on only one drug have been found to have the least success but the greater toxicity.
Although there is no single drug that can truly be desribed as having a major impact on life-expectancy the following are generallly believd to have the greatest positive impact:
- 5-fluorouracil,
- Alimta®,
- Platinol® (cisplatin),
- cyclophosphamide,
- doxorubicin,
- epirubicin,
- ifosfamide,
- interferon,
- methotrexate (high dose),
- mitomycin C,
- timetrexate, and
- vinorelbine.
Historically cisplatin has been generally accepted as the benchmark for which drug effectiveness should be measured. More recently Alimta® (pemetrexed) has had growing support as the drug of choice in single-drug treatments with a reported response rate of sixteen per cent.
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