CANCER vaccines tailored to an individual patient boost their chance of survival after kidney tumours are removed.
The only way to treat kidney cancers is to remove all or part of the kidney. But in half the cases, the tumour reappears within five years. To get the body to attack and destroy any cancer cells after surgery, Dieter Jocham鈥檚 team at the University of L眉beck Medical School in Germany made a vaccine for each patient based on the patient鈥檚 own tumour cells. They gave 177 patients six injections of the vaccine at monthly intervals after surgery. Only two suffered side effects.
After five years, 77.4 per cent of the patients had no recurrence of cancer, compared with 67.8 per cent of patients who did not get the vaccine (The Lancet, vol 363, p 594). 鈥淚t may not sound that big, but you would want to belong to the 10 per cent, wouldn鈥檛 you?鈥� says team member Christian Doehn. 鈥淚t would mean 1000 people in Germany per year benefiting from such a treatment.鈥� Several groups worldwide are testing similar approaches. A small lung tumour trial has also produced promising results.
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