105AD7 Vaccination Ineffective For Advanced Disease.(Brief Article)

2001 JUL 4 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) --

by N.R. Saltmarsh, staff medical writer - Patients with advanced colorectal cancer have nothing to gain from vaccination with 105AD7, an anti-idiotypic monoclonal antibody that mimics the tumor-associated antigen 791T/gp72 on colorectal cancer cells.

That's the conclusion of researchers who studied the vaccine in 162 patients following promising results from phase I trials that showed subjects with advanced disease were able to produce T-cell responses to the vaccine.

C.A. Maxwell-Armstrong and associates in England evaluated 162 patients with advanced colorectal cancer in this prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled survival study. Patients received either vaccine or placebo at baseline, and at six and 12 weeks. Patient groups were similar in terms of length of time from diagnosis of advanced disease, demographics, and metastases; half had malignancies in at least two sites.

Only half of patients reported for all three vaccinations, noted Maxwell-Armstrong and coworkers. Among those remaining, the placebo group actually had longer median survival from study entry (184 vs. 124 days) and from date of diagnosis of advanced disease (486 vs. 456 days) ("Randomized double-blind phase II survival study comparing immunization with the anti-idiotypic monoclonal antibody 105AD7 against placebo in advanced colorectal cancer," British Journal of Cancer, ...