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.
