Friday, October 17, 2008

Breast Cancer Patients Try Vaccine Treatment

Terminal breast cancer patients take part in an early test of a vaccine to train their immune systems to attack cancerous cells.
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1 comment:

Greg Pawelski said...

Tumor immunotherapy studies were prematurely abandoned during the early 90's. One such study was a concept of in situ cancer vaccination based upon studies of biologic response modifiers in an assay. Preliminary results found a striking association between the activity of biologic response modifiers which activate macrophages and the prior treatment status of patients with breast and ovarian cancers.

Effective chemotherapy produced a massive release and processing of tumor antigens, which led to a state in which the human immune system, via in situ cancer vaccination, responded to exogenous macrophage activation signals with potent and specific anti-tumor effects.

It's good to see the resurgence of aggressive cancer vaccine research. Criticism of this research would be typical of those that favor attempts to identify one-size-fits-all treatments through trial-and-error testing.

Circumscription of the clinical initiative by researchers to help patients advances a naive fundamentalism. The choice of researchers to integrate promising insights and methods remains an essential component of new paradigms of cancer treatment.

October 19, 2008 at 9:10 PM

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