A New Therapeutic Vaccine Against Prostate Cancer

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

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

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

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

One trained 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 disturbing listing of hormone-resistant patient, we have very little to offer. Adding months to a man's lifeblood 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 care of prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body and is immovable to standard hormone treatment. For the study, Kantoff's group randomly assigned 512 men to draw Provenge or placebo. All of patients had advanced prostate cancer that had proven opposed 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, implication that Provenge extended survival by 22 to 25 percent.

He contends that if the vaccine were hand-me-down by men with less unbending contagion survival, it might be extended for even longer. "Theoretically, if you take populate 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, emission and hormone therapy, Provenge has been touted as having fewer and less monastic side effects. In this trial, the most common side effects were chills, fever and headache, the researchers noted natural success. Commenting on the exuberant cost of Provenge, Kantoff said that "this is a remedying 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 costly than Provenge".