Vaccine approach extends life of metastatic prostate cancer patients

In a newly published clinical trial, patients with metastatic prostate cancer who received a vaccine of harmless poxviruses engineered to spur an immune system attack on prostate tumor cells lived substantially longer than patients who received a placebo vaccine, report researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and affiliated organizations. The findings will be published by the Journal of Clinical Oncology on its Web site and later in a print edition.

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At the three-year point after the study, 30 percent of the PROSTVAC-VF patients were alive, versus 17 percent of the control group. The median survival of the vaccine group was 24.5 months, compared to 16 months for the control group, an 8.5-month increase. Patients tolerated the vaccine well; only a small number experienced side effects such as fatigue, fevers, and nausea.

"Although this study is relatively small, it offers encouraging evidence of a clinically meaningful benefit from this vaccine approach," says principal investigator and lead author Philip Kantoff, MD, of Dana-Farber, who helped design the trial. Investigators are planning a phase III trial that will enroll about 600 patients to further evaluate the vaccine's effectiveness.