Vaccine Delays Disease Progression In Stage III Patients.(Brief Article)

2001 SEP 12 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) --

by N.R. Saltmarsh, staff medical writer - A polyvalent melanoma vaccine prolongs the time to disease progression - but not necessarily survival - in patients with metastatic melanoma, researchers in the United States have found.

J.C. Bystryn and colleagues at New York University School of Medicine tested the vaccine, prepared from shed antigens, in patients with American Joint Committee on Cancer stage III melanoma. Their results were published in Clinical Cancer Research.

The double-blind trial randomized 24 patients to receive the vaccine and 14 to receive a placebo vaccine, both of which were bound to alum as an adjuvant. All patients had resected melanoma and similarly poor prognosis, based on the nodes being clinically positive or two or more histologically positive nodes.

Subjects were immunized intradermally every 3 weeks x 4, monthly x 3, every 3 months x 2, and then every six months for five years or until disease progression, reported Bystryn and coworkers.

The median time to disease progression was two and one-half times longer in patients treated with melanoma vaccine than those who received placebo vaccine (1.6 years vs. 0.6 year), a significant difference by Cox proportional hazards analysis, noted Bystryn and associates.

Overall survival also was longer in the melanoma vaccine-treated group (median 3.8 years vs. 2.7 years), but this difference was not statistically significant, they added. None of the subjects ...