Designing and testing new intervention therapies for lung cancer and mesothelioma

Lung cancer and mesotheliomas belong to the most devastating cancers with an
extremely poor prognosis. The different lung cancer types and mesotheliomas
arise from different cell types of the lung. They cause yearly over 9.000
deaths only in The Netherlands. The overall 5-year survival is less than 15%.
With the development of drugs that inhibit specific components of signaling
pathways known to be defective in these cancers, modest survival advantages
have been achieved recently. However, genetic instability, an inherent feature
of these tumors, almost invariably leads to escape by either mutations in the
therapeutic target or activation of bypass signaling pathways. Understanding in
detail these mechanisms of escape will be critical to improve the treatments of
patients with these cancers. Reliable model systems that reproduce both
genotypic and phenotypic characteristics of these cancers is an essential step
in developing more effective combination therapies.

The aim of this study is to design and test new intervention therapies on
tumorcells or tumorsamples on there sensitivity for several new drugs. Last few
years there are a lot of new drugs available for cancer and have to be tested
on there effectiveness. With this research we hope that we can quickly make a
good choice which drugs can be tested at patients.

Extra tumorsample will be sampled during research of the diagnosis or treatment
of the disease. Further research will be done on the extra tumorsamples (on
SCID mice)

The performance of an investigation gives always some risks. This is dependent
on the kind of investigation. The time needed to take some tumor sample will
differ from some seconds to a few minutes and will only be done on the
responsibility of the physician. That's why the risk of taking a tumor sample
will be minimal.