To get the best outcome, it’s important that you get an accurate diagnosis and the best care from a team of specialists soon after symptoms first develop. Through our group approach, mesothelioma experts at Memorial Sloan Kettering design a treatment approach that’s designed specifically for you.

By bringing together experts in surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, personalized medicine, and quality of life, we help make sure that we choose the combination of therapies that will be most effective for you.

Improvements in treatment and supportive care in recent years have dramatically lengthened and improved the quality of life for people with mesothelioma.

How We Care for You

When you come to us for care, we’ll evaluate what combination of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy will work best for you.

Working as a team, we’ll: 

• quickly determine if mesothelioma is causing the symptoms you’re having
• readily design a treatment plan customized specifically for you
• start with surgery and other treatments right away
• promptly assess if radiation therapy is right for you, then deliver powerful doses directly to the tumors through the most targeted approaches available
• possibly propose the option of enrolling in a clinical trial that tests a new drug or another novel approach (we usually have trials for people at all stages of the disease)
• offer you life-long follow-up care as well as the resources of a survivorship program that has support groups, integrative medicine resources, and more

To build a plan that makes sense for you, we’ll look at the examinations you’ve had so far, results from imaging and diagnostic tests, and information about how you did with treatments you’ve already gotten (at MSK or somewhere else).

We’ll also look at statistical data from the more than 1,000 people who we’ve treated for mesothelioma over the years as a part of our Mesothelioma Pleural Database and our Mesothelioma Peritoneal Database. These databases contain valuable information about treatment decisions and outcomes that other people experienced, and can help us decide on the smartest next steps for you specifically.

Because we’re involved in mesothelioma research related to all parts of mesothelioma care, MSK is often the first to be aware of the latest scientific discoveries and medical advances.