Results after Intraoperative Therapy in Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma

Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a virulent disease that is essentially incurable. Although surgery cannot currently be considered standard of care, there is general agreement that a certain subset of patients appear to benefit from surgery-based multimodal treatments beyond what would be expected with the current standard of care, pemetrexed-based chemotherapy alone. Exactly who those patients are remains to be defined. One intuitively appealing aspect of surgery-based therapies is that they allow for the employment of an intraoperative adjuvant therapy. There are multiple intraoperative adjuvant therapies, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. This chapter is a review of these treatments.

Keywords: Intraoperative therapy, intrapleural chemotherapy, outcomes, photodynamic therapy.