Thursday 19 April 2012

Vaccine Extends Life of Brain Cancer Patients

Health information A vaccine against the new brain tumor, the material used by cancer patients themselves, is a promise to prolong his life for several months, the results of a multicenter phase two clinical trials show the vaccine.

The effectiveness of the vaccine was conducted in 40 patients undergoing treatment at the University of California San Francisco Comprehensive Cancer Center, University Hospitals Case Medical Center, Cleveland, and tested in New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York.

Patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), malignant neoplasms of the most common and aggressive primary brain which kills thousands of Americans each year.

The study found that the vaccine could prolong the survival of patients by several months, compared to 80 other patients who were treated in the same hospital, and received the standard treatment. Several patients who received the vaccine survived cancer for more than a year, according to a university.
"These results are provocative," said Andrew Parsa neurosurgeon in California, who led the study. "They suggest that doctors may be able to the survival of other patients by combining the vaccine with other drugs that prolong enhance the immune response."

The next step, he said, would be a large randomized clinical trial to analyze the effectiveness of the vaccine in combination with Avastin, a treatment standard for this type of cancer to be compared with the efficacy of Avastin monotherapy. The next test phase, which will be executed by the National Cancer Institute begins enrolling patients later this year.

These results were presented at the American Association of Neurological Surgeons meeting in Miami, USA.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Share/Bookmark