Mesothelioma: Hippo pathway as a target, lessons from COMMAND

[First paragraph] Mesothelioma is an incurable cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. Several countries have witnessed a growth in incidence of epidemic proportions over the last two decades, and approved treatment is limited to front-line chemotherapy [1]. The recently reported COMMAND trial [2] was a robustly designed, hypothesis-driven, double blind randomized phase II trial. This study evaluated the efficacy of the focal adhesion kinase inhibitor Defactinib versus placebo as a maintenance therapy in patients with Merlin negative mesothelioma [2]. COMMAND is one of the few reported randomized trials in mesothelioma that have incorporated prospective molecular stratification, another being the ADAM study [3].