new cancer treatment uses patient's immune sys

I thought it worthwhile posting this extract of a news article which came out of the ASCO conference. Again it demonstrates the growing interest in cancer immunotherapy as effective treatment for various cancers one which has the significant advantage of having very few, if any, side effects.

Note that Prima is not mentioned here because it has not yet produced any results from phase 2b trials since it was classified under "trials in progress" at ASCO whereas all the others below did have results to show and hence were in another category.



New Cancer Treatment Uses Patient's Immune System

Written by Jimmy Balwit, MS
Director of Scientific Communications
International Society for Biological Therapy of Cancer
2010-06-08

Cancer treatments using immunotherapies are coming of age as breadth of promising biological cancer treatments are presented at American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).

Advances in cancer immunotherapies were in the spotlight at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago this week.

Members of the International Society for Biological Therapy of Cancer (iSBTc), the preeminent medical association focused on cancer immunotherapy, announced important advances that are giving doctors new options to fight cancer.

These new options, called immunotherapies or biological treatment, use a patients own immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells.

Clinical studies show promising results in the biological treatment of a wide range of cancers, from advanced melanoma to prostate and breast cancer.

As more studies emerge and immunotherapies move from the lab bench to the bedside, it is becoming increasingly clear that these biological treatment approaches are coming of age as a promising option for cancer patients.
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(Eg. patients with advanced melanoma demonstrated that tre.atment with ipilimumab

Eg. interleukin-21 (IL-21) treatment of melanoma showed promise for this cytokine-based approach)

In addition to these exciting results for biological treatment of melanoma, other studies reported at the ASCO meeting pointed to additional encouraging advances in immunotherapy for other cancers.

Among these were positive reports on the recently approved therapeutic prostate cancer vaccine PROVENGE (Dendreon Corp.) and an antibody directed at another distinct suppressor of anti-tumor immunity, PD-1.


http://www.emaxhealth.com/1/358-new-cancer-treatment-uses-patients-immune-system