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

IT'S NOT A TUMOR!!

[PinkBird]

had to be said!!!

Vaccine?

[Grashnak]

I know they use the word vaccine in TFA, but my understanding of a vaccine (plus a cursory glance at a dictionary) suggests that a vaccine should be something you administer in order to prevent someone from getting a disease, rather than something you use to treat a person who already has the disease.

Any of you bright science boys or girls know what the difference is between a "vaccine" and any other drug you might use to treat a diease? Just wondering.

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.

Re:Vaccine?

[DebateG]

A vaccine is any substance that stimulates your immune system to attack a pathogen specifically. It stimulates what is known as the adaptive immune system, which is the part of the immune system that recognizes a specific infection. For example, you may be infected with Hepatitis A, and that generates a nonspecific inflammatory response. Later on, your T and B cells "learn" to specifically begin attacking the Hepatitis A virus. If you get infected with Hepatitis B, you still have the nonspecific inflammatory response, but your learned response against Hepatitis A doesn't help here; it's very specific for Hepatitis A.

In contrast, most drugs don't prime your immune system against specific proteins on the pathogen. Chemotherapy drugs tend to just kill rapidly dividing cells non-specifically; you get nausea because the normal cells in your gut are also killed. There are some drugs such as monoclonal antibodies that can specifically attack and kill the pathogenic cells, but they don't work by priming your immune cells.

It's a misconception that all vaccines prevent you from getting the disease. The BCG vaccine for TB doesn't really prevent you from getting infected with TB chronically; it prevents you from getting a really severe kind of acute TB. In fact, some vaccines are actually administered after you've already been infected. For example, the rabies vaccine causes a brisk immune response against rabies. You usually receive it *after* you've been bitten by a rabid animal, so there is already rabies virus replicating within your cells. It helps you clear the virus that is already there.

I hope this helps.

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.

Re:Meaningless Statistics

[flynt]

Well I of course agree with your sentiment, calling the results "meaningless" isn't quite right either. They have some meaning, even if they are based on a small sample. For instance, if all 8 patients died the day of their first dose of vaccine, would you call that meaningless? If you read the article, all the actual investigators understand this is only a Phase I study, but that's where everything starts off. I agree, so many things that seem promising do not work out when done in a large trial, so excitement should be tempered until then. Your criticisms of this study would be valid if it were a Phase II/III trial, but this one clearly wasn't designed to show efficacy.

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

Cautious Optimism

[CrazyTalk]

As someone who has a brain tumor (not a glioma, but still malignant) I keep a sharp eye out for new developments. It seems like every other day a new "cure" is announced, but there is a LOT more work to do. Still, this is a good sign and the more research that goes on the better. Even if this ultimately doesn't prove to be as big a help as it initially appears to be, its one step closer. One thing that these types of treatments DO do, which is often overlooked, is prolong the life (And improve the quality of life) of people with the disease, making it something that is "managed" like say Diabetes as opposed to just being a death sentence. I'm 4 and a half years out of what my doctor told me was a 3-5 year life expectency, and I fully intend to beat that by a wide margin.