Hope for cancer vaccine
Monday October 24th, 2011
A "vaccine" developed to help combat lung cancer has shown promising results in a European study.
Researchers say introducing the vaccine to treatment significantly improved the proportion of patients spared progression of their cancer over a six months period.
Some 143 patients in France, Poland, Germany and Hungary took part in the research, testing the treatment for advanced non-small-cell lung cancer.
The vaccine TG4010 is meant to stimulate the immune system to tackle a protein, MUC1, which plays a key role in the cancer.
During the treatment it was added standard platinum-based chemotherapy.
Reporting in The Lancet Oncology, the researchers found that 43 per cent of patients who received the vaccine were progression free after six months. This compared with 35 per cent of those who did not receive it.
Researcher Professor Elisabeth Quoix, from Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France, reports: "These observations point to the importance of patients' biological status as a predictor for success of therapeutic vaccination, and suggest that analysis of biological parameters should be part of the clinical developments in cancer immunology."
The Lancet Oncology October 21 2011
Tags: Cancer | Europe | Respiratory
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