A treatment designed to harness the body's immune system to fight cancer appeared to thwart two forms of the malignancy in studies, boosting prospects for weapons against the disease that act like vaccines

MondayMorning, June 8, 2009

A treatment designed to harness the body's immune system to fight cancer appeared to thwart two forms of the malignancy in studies, boosting prospects for weapons against the disease that act like vaccines. An experimental treatment from Accentia Biopharmaceuticals Inc. (Tampa FL) seemed to delay the return of lymphoma, a cancer of immune cells, by more than a year among patients who achieved remission after chemotherapy. The findings were released last week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Orlando, Florida. After three decades of failed efforts to develop cancer vaccines, success is starting to emerge, said Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, based in Atlanta. "After 30-plus years of trying to find something that works with cancer vaccines, here we find the first glimmer of hope," Lichtenfeld said. The study, along with an April 29 report that Dendreon Inc.'s (Seattle WA) treatment, called Provenge, extended lives of men with prostate cancer, "suggest that perhaps we're finally getting through the barriers to effective vaccine therapy in cancer treatment," he said.

Accentia's lymphoma vaccine is an individualized treatment made from a protein on the surface of cancer cells taken from people with a form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. When the protein is introduced back into patients through the vaccine, it ramps up the infection-fighting cells in their immune system so they eliminate cancer cells left after chemotherapy, said Stephen Schuster, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the lead author of the lymphoma study. Accentia plans to submit the results of the study to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and to European regulators in 60 to 90 days and will seek conditional approval to market the vaccine, Calder said.