Cancer Vaccines Offer Time to Terminal Cases

Wednesday 17 April 2013, Amsterdam

Cancer vaccines may have something to offer both early-stage and late-stage cancer patients, as a therapeutic option to significantly delay disease progression and increase overall survival, according to a new report by healthcare experts.

The new report states that cancer vaccines seem to perform better when used to treat patients with residual disease who have had few previous treatments, possibly due to their immune systems being in better shape than those of patients suffering from advanced cancers who have aggressive treatment.. This suggests that cancer vaccines would be most successful in the treatment of early stage cancer patients.

However, diseases such as pancreatic cancer and lung cancer tend to be diagnosed in the later stages of the disease, and cancer vaccines have also been discovered to be invaluable for these patients too. In patients with advanced cancer, therapeutic cancer vaccines can be used as an adjuvant therapy after treatments such as surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, with the aim of extending overall survival or time to disease progression.

Cancer vaccines in development for the adjuvant treatment of patients with metastatic melanoma have been shown to extend the life of patients from nine to 18 months, significantly longer than the maximum of six months offered with the most effective current treatments, at price tags comparable to the most effective currently available treatments. Offered over a year of extended lifespan, cancer patients would doubtlessly embrace this new treatment option.

Cancer vaccines are used as adjuvant therapies to the surgical removal of tumors, to ensure a complete cure of the disease and destruction of any micro-metastases. This could act in place of the currently offered adjuvant treatment of chemotherapy, which acts to disrupt the rapid growth and division of cancer cells, but also affects healthy cells such as bone marrow, cells of the digestive tract, and hair follicles, causing a variety of unpleasant side effects. Cancer vaccines would thus also reduce the suffering of patients during grueling cancer treatment regimens.

The therapeutic cancer vaccines market is anticipated to grow rapidly throughout the forecast period from an estimated US$590m in 2013 to approximately US$7.59 billion by 2019, driven primarily by the approval of up to 12 vaccines across seven indications.