Brain Cancer Vaccine May Extend Patients' Lives

A new treatment for glioblastoma - an aggressive type of brain cancer that claimed the life of Sen. Ted Kennedy last year - is helping extend lives, CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CBS News contributing medical correspondent, reports.

There are 10,000 new cases of the disease in this country each year, making it the most common brain cancer.

(Scroll down to watch a video of this report)

Lee Sullivan remembers the day when a game of golf became a struggle for life.

"During my back swing, the lights went out," Sullivan said.

He had a seizure and passed out. The diagnosis: glioblastoma.

"Whenever you get a diagnosis for brain cancer, you're not really expecting a long-term survival," Sullivan said.

The statistics are particularly grim for glioblastoma. On average, patients live about 14 months after diagnosis.

Dr. John Sampson, of Duke University Medical Center, and others have been working on a vaccine that could help about one-third of these patients, those whose tumors have a gene mutation that fuels aggressive growth.

"It educates the immune system to produce antibodies, or magic bullets, that really go and find the tumor and help the immune system attack the tumor very specifically," Sampson said.

In results released Monday, patients who received the vaccine in addition to the standard therapy of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy extended their survival for 26 months.

Sampson said he has patients who have lived for five years on the vaccine. Sullivan is hoping to do better than that.

"I'm almost 12 months into my treatments now feeling great, doing very well," Sullivan said.

This study is small - just 18 patients - but researchers are planning a bigger Phase III trial to confirm these results.

[clinicaltrialsGBM]

Clinical trials for Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) now enrolling nationwide. DCVax personalized dendritic cell immunotherapy vaccine. For more information visit:

http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00045968

UCLA Brain Tumor Center
http://neurosurgery.ucla.edu/body.cfm?id=32

and non-profit partners Miles for Hope
http://www.milesforhope.org/

[Johnclave786]

Brain surgery may harm normal tissue. Brain damage can be a serious problem. It can cause problems with thinking, seeing, or speaking. It can also cause personality changes or seizures. Most of these problems lessen or disappear with time

http://www.biblehealth.com/brain-cancer/brain-cancer-and-its-facts.html

[SHRIVES16]

I stumbled upon a website that has cancer information. It seems to supply a great deal of cancer treatment options. Not sure if anyone knows anything about them, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN). It was http://www.nccn.com/ if anyone is interested!

[healingnews]

The key to this article is reading between the lines. It says vaccines "may" help, which means "not necessarilly". Based on our verifiable facts, improper diet and alcohol consumption can often exacerbate this condition, leading to death regardless. Vaccines are simply shots of pathogens, hoping these poisons will "kick in" antigens. Common sense often works better than all the drugs, chemicals, surgery and radiation "therapies" combined, that often lead to even worse side effects that the disease they are "designed" to treat. http://www.HealingNews.com

[raycatcher]

At last! A significant breakthrough in treatment of this horrible tumor! If sufferers can be given an additional two years of relatively comfortable life, it's all worth it, even if it is a bid for additiional research grants. One day we will understand the genetic makeup of this and other tumors, and we will be able to tailor treatment to each individual tumor. All of this comes at great costs involved in the research, but how do you put a value on a human life?

[kenhamlett]

We need more information on this one.

Is this safer and more effective than Curcumin?
What is its method of action?
Has this actually had any broad testing or is this a laboratory based hypothesis?

These announcements are often a ploy to gain more research finding so I have to remain skeptical until more information is disclosed.

[kenhamlett]

Dear porcine_aviato

It is the job of a news service to give enough information to educate the reader at least on the basics. Otherwise why write the article?
I did look around and found it seems to be another Duke University ploy for research dollars. CDX-110 is not really "new" just abandoned/discarded/replaced? due to an assortment of reasons. It may or may not extend the time it takes to die but that is nothing novel. With this news which is more like an announcement than news it appears that somehow this trial is supposed to be (potentially) successful. The obvious question is how is the trial of any new and real value to science or medicine since a small potential delay in death is not really a success.

Could it be that you are one of those dead weight researchers trying to validate a waste of resources?

[Randtastic]

kenhamlett - you dismiss this novel, experimental therapy as abandoned/discarded/replaced (it's actually going into Phase 3 trials) yet ask if it has been proven safer and more effective than the spice Indian tumeric? With a dopey question/comment like that you should stick to the commenting only in the Style/Entertainment pages going forward. If you should get sick by all means eat all the curry dishes you can stomach for therapy. That way you won't be party to wasting any research resources that might delay your death just a small amount.

[gbmwife]

My husband has been diagnosed with Grade 4 brain Cancer recently and we are from Canada....We are really interested in this vaccine information can you please tell us who we can get in contact with.

[Randtastic]

gbmwife - more information on this vaccine can be found here: http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00458601?term=celldex&rank=6

[gbmdaughter]

My father was just diagnosed with GBM and we are also from Canada. I was wondering if you found any information regarding this vaccine.