“Vaccine” For Advanced Prostate Cancer Wins FDA Approval

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday approved a new therapy for certain men with advanced prostate cancer that uses their own immune system to fight the disease; although described as a “vaccine” the new therapy, called Provenge, treats rather than prevents prostate cancer.

In a statement the manufacturer, Seattle-based Dendreon Corp, described Provenge (sipuleucel-T) as the first therapy in a class known as “autologous cellular immunotherapies”, marking a significant step in personalized treatment for cancer.

According to Dendreon, Provenge is designed to treat:

“… asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic metastatic, castrate-resistant (hormone-refractory) prostate cancer (CRPC).”

Dr Karen Midthun, acting director of the federal agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, explained that Provenge offered:

“A new treatment option for men with advanced prostate cancer, who currently have limited effective therapies available.”

In the US, prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men, after skin cancer, and mostly affects older men.

According to figures from the National Cancer Institute, last year in the US there were some 192,000 new cases of prostate cancer and 27,000 deaths to the disease. Read more

Men With Asthma And Eczema May Have Lower Cancer Risk

If you have asthma or eczema, your hyper reactive immune system may lower your risk of some of the most common types of cancer, according to a study published this month in Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the scientific journal of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI).

“Allergic conditions such as asthma and eczema that result from a hyper reactive immune system might enhance the body’s ability to remove malignant cells, which might in turn lower cancer risk,” said Mariam El-Zein, PhD, INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier, Laval, Québec, Canada, lead author of the article. “In our study, men with asthma had lower odds of getting stomach cancer and those with eczema had lower odds of developing lung cancer, when compared to men who did not have these conditions.”

The population-based case-control study was conducted in Montreal, Québec over a seven year period among 3,300 male cancer patients and a control group of 500. Odds ratios were calculated for the association between asthma or eczema and more than 20 cancer types combined, as well as for each of eight common cancer types (stomach, colon, rectum, lung, prostate, bladder, skin and lymph nodes). Read more

Cancer-Fighting Cells Boosted By Carbon Nanotubes

Yale University engineers have found that the defects in carbon nanotubes cause T cell antigens to cluster in the blood and stimulate the body’s natural immune response. Their findings, which appear as the cover article of the April 20 issue of the journal Langmuir, could improve current adoptive immunotherapy, a treatment used to boost the body’s ability to fight cancer.

Adoptive immunotherapy involves extracting a patient’s blood so that the number of naturally occurring T cells (a type of white blood cell) can reproduce more effectively in the laboratory. Although the body produces its own tumor-fighting T cells, they are often suppressed by the tumor and are too few to be effective. Scientists boost the production of T cells outside the body using different substances that encourage T cell antigens to cluster in high concentrations. The better these substances are at clustering T cell antigens, the greater the immune cell proliferation. Once enough T cells are produced, the blood is transferred back into the patient’s body.

The Yale team had previously reported the unexpected effect that carbon nanotubes had on T cell production. They found that the antigens, when presented on the surface of the nanotubes, stimulated T cell response far more effectively than coating other substrates such as polystyrene in the antigens, even though the total amount of antigens used remained the same.

Now they have discovered the reason behind the increased stimulation. They found that the antigens cluster in high concentrations around the tiny defects found in the carbon nanotubes. Read more

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