Experimental Prostate Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise
- By BSTQ Staff
Metastatic prostate cancer patients who received an investigational vaccine made from their own frozen immune cells lived 10 months longer than those not treated with it, according to data presented by researchers at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson.
In an explanatory, multi-institutional analysis, researchers administered the vaccine APC8015F to a group of patients from the control arm of three randomized Phase III clinical trials evaluating sipuleucel-T (Provenge), a similar FDA-approved cancer vaccine for metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer. APC8015F is made from immune system cells taken from a patient with prostate cancer. However, unlike sipuleucel-T, which is never frozen, APC8015F is cryopreserved at a time before the disease progresses. Results from the analysis showed that patients treated with APC8015F had improved survival relative to the patients who were not treated in the control arm. Following disease progression, the median survival of patients treated with APC8015F was 20 months compared with 9.8 months for control patients.
