Dr. J. F. Pingpank Jr.

Bio

Like many in the field, James Pingpank, M.D., a surgical oncologist at the University of Pittsburgh Hillman Cancer Center, has found that regional treatment is the most effective in combating peritoneal mesothelioma without damaging the surrounding healthy tissue. He strongly advocates surgery followed by heated chemotherapy, in which hot chemotherapy drugs are delivered directly into the abdominal cavity.

But one of the most important things is how we are going to identify the patients who are at high risk for an early local recurrence.

Many of his studies aim to decrease the rate of this early recurrence. He is focusing on increasing progression-free survival, the amount of time after treatment before the disease spreads. As such, he also tries to increase his patients’ overall survival or their total life span after treatment.

Pingpank conducted a trial to study these survival rates in malignant peritoneal mesothelioma patients who received surgical resection and regional chemotherapy. Pingpank found that the median progression-free survival was 17 months, and median overall survival was 92 months. This means that half the patients in the study survived about 7.5 years or longer after treatment. Comparatively, only about 16 percent of all peritoneal mesothelioma patients survive five years after diagnosis.

In addition to his position as surgical oncologist at the Hillman Cancer Center, Pingpank is also an associate professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Publications

Of his 40 published articles, four of Pingpank's scholarly works directly discuss mesothelioma. His most recent, which discussed activated pathways and their impact on mesothelioma patients' survival rates, was published in the January 2011 issue of Cancer, while the others appeared in Annals of Surgical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research and the Journal of Clinical Oncology.