How Metastasis Plays a Role in Determining Mesothelioma Surgery Eligibility

So when this patient who presents to us with possible mesothelioma now has to be seen again by all the different specialties who deal with this. And the reason he needs to be seen by them is that they will go out of their way to figure out has the disease gone through, again, the various walls of the chest. Has it gone through the pleura into the chest wall? Has it gone through the diaphragm going into the abdominal cavity, through the pericardial sac? Or has it really gone so high up in the chest around the blood vessels that you can't peel it off of the blood vessels? Those are very important issues because those, if any of that is present-- in addition, you're looking for disease outside the chest like metastatic disease-- all of those make a patient not a surgical candidate. The other thing that's important is to stage the patients accurately because part of what we're doing with this disease is we're learning about it. Because the numbers are small, because there aren't many patients, because the treatments are really not very organized, what happens is we really can't make any definitive judgments about the effect of our therapy. So in order to learn about what we're doing and how we can help the next patient with this disease, we really have to have a very organized approach where we know the stage that we started with and we know the therapy that we instituted. Then we know, stage for stage, what the effect of the therapy was. [MUSIC PLAYING]