Current treatments—immunotherapy and chemotherapy—offer limited benefit. Patients—often men who worked in shipbuilding, oil refining and asbestos manufacturing—face a median survival of approximately 12 months and a five-year survival rate of around 10%.

“It’s a disease of a significant unmet medical need,” says Brian Cunniff, a professor at the University of Vermont.

Now, a study published in Nature Communications by Cunniff, UVM research scientist Victoria Gibson and an international team of collaborators reports a counterintuitive new approach to treating the disease—and perhaps other cancers.