Brain Cancer Vaccine From Tumor is Found
Scientists are developing a treatment that improves survival hope of patients with brain cancer. The new vaccine is made from the patient’s tumor.
Injectable vaccine in combination with standard treatments are proven effective in clinical trials involving 120 patients in the U.S..
All patients had glioblastoma tumor, a deadly form of brain cancer that kills 98 percent of patients within five years. The disease is generally cured by surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. But the cancer are more vulnerable to relapse.
In phase II of the trials, the scientists tested the vaccine based on ‘heat shock’ proteins which was taken from tumor surgery. Heat shock proteins produced in response to stress and is very active in cancer cells.
Compared with 80 patients who did not receive the vaccine, injectable vaccines increase the life expectancy of more than 40 patients on average for several months. Some patients who were given the vaccine were still alive after more than a year.
The leader of the experiment and neurosurgeon Dr. Andrew Parsa, from the University of California at San Francisco, said, “These results are provocative. Doctor may be able to prolong survival of patients by combining the vaccine with other drugs that enhance the immune response,” he said, according to the Dailymail.
The results were presented today at the annual meeting of the American Association of Neurosurgery in Miami, Florida.
A trial conducted on 4700 patients randomized to compare the effectiveness of the vaccine with chemotherapy with Avastin drugs done by ??the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
Tagged with: brain cancer, brain cancer vaccine, new brain cancer vaccine, tumor brain cancer vaccine,
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