After decades of study and testing, a cancer vaccine is on the way. Dr Thomas Wagner, founder of Orbis Health Solutions, uses his own immune system body to fight the disease, with each dose individualized to the patient, according to ABC News.
Typically, cancer cells evade a person's immune system because they are recognized (by the immune system) as that person's cells.
Wagner developed a tumor lysate particle only (TLPO) vaccine that uses the patient's cancer cells to target specific sites. It then "shows" them to the body using the vaccine. So the immune system can gain the ability to detect these cancer cells as an infection, allowing it to fight the cancer.
Wagner believes this type of cancer treatment could be the key to finding the long-awaited cure for cancer, all cancers, if combined with early detection.
Wagner's TLPO cancer vaccine has been tested in hundreds of patients with advanced forms of melanoma in Phase 2 clinical trials.
The latest data presented at an academic conference showed that almost 95% of people who received the vaccine continued to live three years after starting treatment, and 64% were completely free of the disease. Among the more advanced forms of melanoma, disease-free survival after three years for people with stage III disease was 60% in the vaccine-only group, compared with about 39% in the placebo group. Disease-free survival for people with stage IV disease was about 68% in the vaccine-only group and zero in the placebo group.
The most common side effects were redness or pain at the injection site, fever and fatigue after injection – similar to other vaccines that stimulate an immune response.
Based on these data and other studies, the US Food and Drug Administration gave the Wagner vaccine permission to start a clinic essay Phase 3. It will be a three-year effort with a goal of enrolling 500 people and is planned to begin sometime this year, said Riley Polk, president of Orbis Health Solutions.
