New Treatment Trains Immune System To Kill Cancer

Al writes "A vaccine in clinical trials at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine triggers the human immune system to attack a faulty protein that's often abundant in colorectal cancer tissue and precancerous tissue. If it works as hoped, it could remove the need for repeated colonoscopies in patients at high risk for developing colorectal cancer. The vaccine has already proven safe in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. It works by spurring the body to manufacture antibodies against the abnormal version of a mucous protein called MUC1. While moderate amounts of the protein are found in the lining of normal intestines, high levels of a defective form of MUC1 are present in about half of advanced adenomas and the majority of colorectal cancers."

Comments

Natural Selection

[minorgroove]

Won't this only provide selective pressure for those mutant cells to make another variant of Mucin1? That is exactly how aggressive cancers form in the first place.

Re:Beware of the hype

[physburn]

Yes, Immune Therapy has been tried for years, but that doesn't mean it will never amount to anything. It only means that its hard to get right. The first batch of Cancer, Immune Therapies are only now coming to market. One example is Provenge, for otherwise untreatable Prostate Cancer, by the Dendreon Corporation, its still awaiting FDA approval, in the first of its phase III trials, turned a 3 year survivial rate from around %20 to around %40, and added a mean 3 months of life. Thats hardly a cure all, but it is significant. If approved Provenge will probably be the first Cancer Immune Therapy on the market, likely leading to many of Vaccines for many other Tumors over the next ten or so years. (Drugs take that long or longer to market unfortunately).

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