Brain Tumor Vaccine Shows Promising Results

ScienceDaily is reporting that a new vaccine used in the treatment of a cancer found primarliy in the brain is showing promising results after an initial trial at the University of California. "Of the 12 patients being treated, eight can currently be evaluated for overall survival, while four are still receiving treatment. Seven out of the eight patients have exceeded the historical median benchmark of 6.5 months survival from time of recurrence. The investigators will continue to follow the patients for overall survival. Based on these results, a larger, multi-center phase 2 study is planned for late 2007."

Comments

Re:Vaccine?

[Anonymous Coward]

This particular cancer "recurrs".

The vaccine is made from the previously cut-out cancer cell of that patient,
and is used to prevent recurrence.

Meaningless Statistics

[w.p.richardson]

Presumably this is a therapeutic vaccine, since survival data is reported. Don't think you could get this as a prophylactic vaccine in order to ward off future brain tumors.

As for the statistics, the fact that 7/8 have exceeded the historical median survival is fairly meaningless. I'm sure that historical literature could be produced to provide equivalent results in a single small study. Also, at a single site, you have no insight into the selection criteria for the patients enrolled... Were they selected because they were highly likely to survive (e.g., early stage disease)? Is the investigational site vested in the therapy (likely the case, at least for a principal investigator)?

Will be interesting to see what phase 2 studies bring - hopefully it works out as well as they describe here, but if history is any judge, that is probably not going to be the case.

Immune response booster

[jbeaupre]

My crude understanding has been that vaccines are intended to amplify the immune response to pathogens. This can happen before or during a disease (prophylactic or therapeutic according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine