Sticking it to Cancer
A new vaccine, amazingly, may rid the world of cervical cancer, while doctors aim other needles at more killer tumors
After the infusion, Mosher got doses of a chemical that helps the cells to replicate. A month later she had a CT scan. "Twenty tumors in my lungs were just going away." She has been free of cancer since 2004.
The method is called adoptive cell transfer, and Rosenberg has used it on 35 patients. Half of them saw their tumors shrink, sometimes to nothing. Not everyone is bowled over, however. "A lot of the objections Steve has to vaccines can also apply to adoptive cell transfer," says immunologist Jeffrey Schlom, who works with Rosenberg at NCI. "These are small numbers, prone to bias, and it's not clear how many patients can actually be helped in this way." The treatment is harsh--Mosher ended up on a ventilator at one point--and it's cumbersome and expensive and complex.
Schlom and others also think vaccines are dismissed too quickly. Melting away tumors may be the traditional version of success, he says, but vaccines call for a different definition. "We're talking about controlling disease. We all live with viruses in our bodies, and we control them--we don't eliminate them," Schlom says. "And with vaccines, we're starting to see patients live longer with a good quality of life but little tumor shrinkage. Provenge, for instance, got months of extra survival but no toxicity. That's very exciting." Whatever the method, the goal is to gain good years. "Clearly, we're not there yet," says Sznol. "But I hope, and I think, that we're getting closer."
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