Cancer vaccine gets first test in patients
By Nathan Seppa
From Chicago, at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology
An experimental cancer vaccine given to 58 patients for whom all other treatments had failed induced an immune response in all of them, suggesting the vaccine can sensitize the body to the presence of tumor cells. This is the first human test of the vaccine.
One patient’s colon tumor shrank under the therapy, and cancers of the colon, stomach, pancreas, breast, and lung in 22 other people stopped growing, says John L. Marshall of Georgetown University, who conducted the test with several colleagues.