Cuba’s Lung Cancer Vaccine Heading to the US
Tim Povtak
 Mar 17, 2016

The Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, will soon begin a history-making clinical trial involving CimaVax, a much-anticipated lung cancer vaccine developed in Cuba’s Center for Molecular Immunology.

The loosening of the 54-year-old Cuba embargo made access to the vaccine in the U.S. possible.

The Cuban lung cancer vaccine, which has elicited rave reviews internationally, was tested for more than two decades and has been used regularly in the Caribbean nation since 2011. It has been used by more than 5,000 people worldwide, including 1,000 Cubans.

“The bottom line is that this vaccine works,” Dr. Kelvin Lee of the Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy Program at Roswell Park said in the cancer center’s blog. “And the ease of administration, combined with the inexpensive cost, could make it a very attractive option in the United States.”

More:
http://www.asbestos.com/news/2016/03/17/cuba-lung-cancer-vaccine-united-states/

Cuban Vaccine Tested in Canadian Trial

Judith Randal

Mark Vincent, M.B., Ch.B., a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Canada, is an oncologist at the London Regional Cancer Center, Ontario. There he is running a trial of the Cuban vaccine in advanced non-small cell lung cancer patients who haven’t been helped by chemotherapy. It is the vaccine’s first trial outside its homeland and Vincent would clearly like that soft-pedaled. In talking to a reporter, he made a point of telling her that he would not “want to be associated with any particular political viewpoint.”

The conversation then turned to the rationale for the vaccine, starting with Vincent’s reminder that circulating estrogen—the estrogen that floats in the blood as a matter of course—can drive breast cancer growth.

Similarly, he said, certain other cancers—non-small cell lung and many head and neck cancers, for instance—can be fueled by epidermal growth factor (EGF), which also circulates in the blood. The vaccine, accordingly, is meant to cause a patient’s immune system to form antibodies to EGF that will prevent its doing that.

In a pilot study in Cuba, all patients given the vaccine have had advanced non-small cell lung cancer. The study is ongoing. In a follow-up study, the 80 patients in the Canadian trial, which opened last September, are being randomized to get or not get the vaccine. Vincent is not sure of definitive results. “We may find,” he said, “that our end-stage people with non-small cell lung cancer do not mount an immune response to anything because they are too immuno-depressed. If so, we may need to move to a randomized study of the vaccine in patients with slightly less advanced disease.”

In the current trial, however, detecting survival differences between the treated patients and the controls is secondary to assessing the vaccine’s safety and immunogenicity. It is not, Vincent indicated, that the Cuban findings on these scores are invalid; they are not. In fact, after a trip to Havana with a Canadian Medical Research Council group, he came away thinking that many of the scientists he met there “seemed quite good and could probably find employment anywhere in the western world.”

More:
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/92/13/1037.full

Cuba’s Had A Lung Cancer Vaccine For Years, And Now It’s Coming To The U.S.

 05/14/2015 11:24 am ET | Updated Apr 15, 2016


President Barack Obama became the first president to visit Cuba in almost 90 years when he and first lady Michelle Obama traveled to the island nation in March. But one of the most exciting things about the thawing of relations between Cuba and the U.S. is happening stateside right now: the possibility of clinical trials on a drug to prevent lung cancer, and possibly other cancers, too.

CimaVax, which is both a treatment and vaccine for lung cancer, has been researched in Cuba for 25 years and free to the Cuban public since 2011. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s trade mission to Cuba in April 2015 resulted in a signed agreement to bring CimaVax to the U.S., but as with all international drugs and treatments, U.S. researchers need to conduct clinical trials and replicate international scientists’ results before it becomes available to the American public.

“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,” said Dr. Kelvin Lee, Jacobs Family Chair in Immunology and co-leader of the Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy Program at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, the research center that is evaluating CimaVax for U.S. use.

The hoped-for success of CimaVax availability in the U.S. is just one example of the possibilities that come with open trade between the two nations. When Obama loosened the United State’s 55-year trade embargo against Cuba in December, he allowed for such joint research deals to be finalized. Similar programs might have been impossible just a few years ago.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2016/02/22/cuba-lung-cancer-vaccine_n_7267518.html

Cuba Has Made At Least 3 Major Medical Innovations That We Need

The trade embargo is holding up research in some crucial areas.

 03/15/2016 02:36 pm ET
Anna Almendrala 


By most measures, the United States’ business-friendly environment has proven to be fertile for medical innovation. Compared to other countries, America has filed the most patents in the life sciences, is conducting most of the world’s clinical trials and has published the most biomedical research.

That’s what makes the medical prominence of Cuba all the more surprising to those who view a free market as an essential driver of scientific discovery. Cuba is very poor, and yet the country has some of the healthiest, most long-lived residents in the world — as well as a medical invention or two that could run circles around U.S. therapies, thanks to government investment in scientific research and a preventive public health approach that views medical care as a birthright.

The island nation, hemmed in by a 54-year trade embargo with the U.S., can’t exchange goods with one of the world’s largest economies and the largest medical market. Still, the country is an unlikely global leader in public health and scientific investment.

“If people knew about these cutting-edge treatments coming out of Cuba, people would want to have them,” said Pierre LaRamée, executive director of the Oakland-based Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba, which advocates for Cuban medical inventions in the U.S. and publishes an international, peer-reviewed journal focusing on Cuban health and medicine.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cuba-medical-innovations_us_56ddfacfe4b03a4056799015

On edit, this article was just added to Good Reads, also:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016161399