Cancer Vaccine May Help Patients With Metastasis To The Lungs.(Brief Article)

2001 MAY 23 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) --

A custom-made vaccine created from a patient's own cancer tumor cells appears effective in prolonging the survival of patients with malignant melanoma, the deadliest form of the skin cancer, that has been removed after having spread to the lungs.

David Berd, MD, professor of medicine at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and a member of Jefferson's Kimmel Cancer Center, and his colleagues had previously shown the vaccine was effective in treating patients with malignant melanoma, the fastest growing cancer in the United States.

The vaccine is termed autologous, meaning that it's prepared from a patient's own cancer cells. Before injecting the cells into patients, the cells are inactivated and then treated with dinitrophenyl (DNP), which is a chemical known as a hapten and which modifies them. The altered cells appear foreign enough to the immune system for it to react against them.

In the current study, Berd and his co-workers gave the vaccine to 37 patients with advanced (stage IV) melanoma that has spread beyond the lymph nodes. Twenty patients had cancer that had spread to the lung. The others had disease spread to other areas. Each had surgery to completely remove the cancer.

Berd et al. found that giving the DNP vaccine to those patients following their surgery resulted in an estimated 59% of patients living three years, which he terms a "good response for these patients." Only 10% to 20% of such patients typically live five years or more with surgery alone.

He reported his team's results May 14, 2001, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in San Francisco, California.