According to an abstract presented at this year's meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, there may be a promising therapeutic vaccine in the pipeline for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer.
The reason reseachers are calling the vaccine promising is because some patients that were able to be evaluated for the study (12 of 71, or 17%) have survived well beyond expectations--notably, between 48-76 months following treatment with what is known as belagenpumatucel-L (Lucanix).
Belagenpumatucel-L is a virus-free vaccine that is derived from a handful of allogeneic NSCLC cell lines (two adenocarcinoma and one each squamous-cell and large cell carcinoma) transfected with transforming growth factor beta-2 (TGF-?2) antisense gene. the protein TGF-?2 has been identified as playing a important role in the regulating growth and function in both normal and cancerous cells.
This was a Phase II trial, and initially included 75 participants who had undergone chemotherapy and whose disease was stable. Its findings were reported by Lyudmila Bazhenova, MD, of the University of California San Diego.
Researchers have already enrolled 445 patients of a projected 500 in a Phase III trial of the vaccine.
Source: MedPage Today
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