A New Therapeutic Vaccine Against Prostate Cancer

A New Therapeutic Vaccine Against Prostate Cancer.
A newly approved beneficial prostate cancer vaccine won the abide Wednesday of a Medicare admonition committee, increasing the chances that Medicare will pay for the drug. Officials from Medicare, the federal guaranty program for the elderly and disabled, will consider the committee's vote when making a final decision on payment. Such a determination is expected in several months, the Wall Street Journal reported. The vaccine, called Provenge and made by the Dendreon Corp, costs $93000 per tireless and extends survival by about four months on average, according to results from clinical trials.

A office published in July in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the vaccine extended the lives of men with metastatic tumors wilful to bar hormonal treatment, compared with no treatment. And the therapy involved less toxicity than chemotherapy.

Provenge is a salutary (not preventive) vaccine made from the patient's own white blood cells. Once removed from the patient, the cells are treated with the panacea and placed back into the patient. These treated cells then trigger an invulnerable response that in turn kills cancer cells, leaving average cells unharmed.

The vaccine is given intravenously in a three-dose schedule delivered in two-week intervals. "The plan of trying to harness the immune system to fight cancer has been something that occupy have tried to attain for many years; this is one such strategy," study lead researcher Dr Philip Kantoff, a professor of remedy at Harvard Medical School and a medical oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, told HealthDay.

One proficient said the therapy, while far from a cure, "looks promising". Dr Elizabeth Kavaler, an urologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said that "in this woebegone sort of hormone-resistant patient, we have very little to offer. Adding months to a man's freshness is better than doing nothing, especially if the treatment involves minimal morbidity, as this vaccine promises".

In April, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Provenge for curing of prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body and is stubborn to standard hormone treatment. For the study, Kantoff's group randomly assigned 512 men to make Provenge or placebo. All of patients had advanced prostate cancer that had proven unsubmissive to standard hormonal therapy.

On average, men receiving Provenge lived 4,1 months longer than men receiving a placebo, the researchers found. Average survival was 25,8 months for men in the Provenge group, compared with 21,7 months for men in the placebo group, spirit that Provenge extended survival by 22 to 25 percent.

He contends that if the vaccine were second-hand by men with less uncompromising condition survival, it might be extended for even longer. "Theoretically, if you take community with less diseases and you stimulate the immune system, you could have a more profound effect, but we don't really know that yet".

Compared with other treatments, such as chemotherapy, emanation and hormone therapy, Provenge has been touted as having fewer and less stark side effects. In this trial, the most common side effects were chills, fever and headache, the researchers noted male enhancement. Commenting on the superior cost of Provenge, Kantoff said that "this is a care given over a four-week period, as opposed to other treatments that are given over many months, where the costs can be high as well, if not comparable to or more up-market than Provenge".