Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/14/cuba-lung-cancer-vaccine_n_7267518.html
When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) headed to Havana on a historic trade mission in April, he returned with the promise of an important commodity: a Cuban-developed lung cancer vaccine.
The vaccine, called CimaVax, has been researched in Cuba for 25 years and became available for free to the Cuban public in 2011. The country's Center for Molecular Immunology signed an agreement last month with Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York to import CimaVax and begin clinical trials in the United States.
"We’re still at the very early stages of assessing the promise of this vaccine, but the evidence so far from clinical trials in Cuba and Europe has been striking," Dr. Kelvin Lee, Jacobs Family Chair in Immunology and co-leader of the Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy Program at Roswell Park, told The Huffington Post.
When President Obama loosened the United State's 55-year long trade embargo against the island nation in December, he allowed for such joint research deals to be finalized. Similar programs might have been impossible just a few years ago.
Cuba has long been known for its high-quality cigars, and lung cancer is a major public health problem and the fourth-leading cause of death in the country. A 2007 study of patients with stages IIIB and IV lung cancer, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, confirmed the safety of the CimaVax and showed an increase in tumor-reducing antibody production in more than half of cases. It proved particularly effective for increased survival if the study participant was younger than 60.
So far, 5,000 patients worldwide have been treated with CimaVax, including 1,000 patients in Cuba. Lee said the latest Cuban study of 405 patients, which has not yet been published, confirms earlier findings about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. What's more, the shot is cheap -- it costs the Cuban government just $1, Wired reported. And studies have found there are no significant side effects.
"We think it may be an effective way to prevent cancer from developing or recurring, so that’s where a lot of our team’s excitement comes in," Lee said. "There’s good reason to believe that this vaccine may be effective in both treating and preventing several types of cancer, including not only lung but breast, colorectal, head-and-neck, prostate and ovarian cancers, so the potential positive impact of this approach could be enormous."
Preclinical investigations of CimaVax at Roswell Park and the unpublished findings of the 405-patient Cuban study are promising, according to Lee. CimaVax works by blocking a hormone that causes lung cancer tumors to grow, a method which has also been shown to be effective in treating colon cancer. That fuels researchers' hope that the vaccine will be an effective treatment for other types of cancer as well.
Still, he acknowledged that the vaccine needs rigorous testing in each of these different disease areas to know whether or not the drug will work as well as the scientists at Roswell Park hope. To be clear, the CimaVax doesn't cure cancer. It's a therapeutic vaccine that works by targeting the tumor itself, specifically going after the proteins that allow a tumor to keep growing. (And as PBS points out, a person can't just take a shot of CimaVax and continue to smoke without fear of lung cancer.)
"We hope to determine in the next few years whether giving CimaVax to patients who’ve had a lung cancer removed, or maybe even to people at high risk of developing lung or head-and-neck cancers because of a history of heavy smoking, may be beneficial and may spare those people from having a cancer diagnosis or recurrence," Lee said.
What CimaVax is
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancers-in-general/cancer-questions/can-you-tell-me-about-the-cimavax-lung-cancer-vaccine
CimaVax EGF is a vaccine treatment being developed in Cuba for non small cell lung cancer.
The vaccine targets a particular protein called epidermal growth factor (EGF). EGF occurs naturally in the body and signals to cells to grow and divide. It does this by attaching to a receptor protein on the cell surface. Some cancers make the body produce too much EGF so that the cells grow and divide uncontrollably.
The CimaVax vaccine is made up of two proteins, one of which is EGF. The vaccine works by stimulating the body’s immune response. It encourages the body to make antibodies that recognise and bind to EGF. This stops the EGF attaching to the receptors on cancer cells. So there is no signal telling the cancer cells to grow and divide. This slows the growth of the cancer.
Several small trials using the vaccine have had promising results. The results of a phase 2 trial for people with advanced non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) were published in early 2008. The trial involved 80 people with stage 3b and stage 4 NSCLC. Everyone in the trial had chemotherapy. After chemotherapy was complete, half of the people had the vaccine. The aims of the trial were to find out
- If the vaccine could help people live longer
- What side effects people have
- The immune response people had to it
The results showed that people who had the vaccine lived slightly longer – on average about 4 to 6 months. It also improved people’s quality of life by reducing symptoms such as coughing and breathlessness.
The trial results also showed that people younger than 60 did better than those who were over 60. There were 12 people under 60 who had a good immune response and their improvement in survival was greatest – they lived on average for just over 15 months compared to 7.4 months for people who didn’t have the vaccine. Do remember that this is a small group – 12 is really too small a number to draw any firm conclusions.
The side effects of the vaccine were mild. The most common effects were chills, fever and feeling sick.
The researchers tested whether people produced antibodies to EGF (an immune response) with a blood test. People who showed an immune response on the test did better than people who did not produce antibodies.
