Prostate Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise

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An experimental vaccine has extended the lives of men with advanced prostate cancer in a clinical trial, according to the therapy's developer, Dendreon.

The test results appear to represent the first time that a cancer vaccine has extended lives in late-stage clinical trial. But unlike conventional vaccines, cancer vaccines - also called cancer immuno-therapy - do not prevent disease. Rather, they harness the immune system to fight the disease after it has developed. Many companies have stumbled trying to develop such treatments, and no treatment has reached the U.S. market.

Dendreon, a biotechnology company in Seattle, hopes to be first and has said it is aiming for approval in 2006. Its drug, Provenge, would be its first marketed product.

The results raised the possibility that Provenge might be approved earlier or for a larger patient population.

"Provenge may have a broader market reach than we previously anticipated," said Dendreon's chief executive, Mitchell Gold. The company is talking to the Food and Drug Administration about the approval process, he said.

Dendreon said there had been a statistically significant increase in the median survival of those who took Provenge compared with those who took a placebo.

Moreover, the company said substantially more Provenge users were alive after three years than those in the placebo group.

The trial involved 127 men with late-stage cancer that could no longer be controlled by hormone therapy.

The company did not provide any numbers, saying that doing so would disqualify the results from being presented at a conference or published in a journal. But Gold said the results were better than the roughly two-and-a-half-month extension of life conferred by Taxotere, an approved drug for prostate cancer produced by Aventis, based in France.

The test results were based on new data from a three-year trial in which Provenge initially failed to delay the time before cancer worsened.

But Dendreon said the drug did work in a subset of patients with less aggressive tumors. The company is conducting a second trial only on patients with less aggressive tumors.

The result showed the survival benefit for the trial as a whole, not just those with less aggressive tumors.

Drug That Can Treat Enlarged Prostate
Millions of men stand to benefit from a discovery by scientists at University College, London that could provide a breakthrough in the treatment of enlargement of the prostate gland.

The UCL team has developed a new drug called a Rho-kinase inhibitor that, in preliminary tests, has been found to treat the condition by both relaxing the prostate and stopping the growth of cells within it. Their findings were set out in the Journal of Urology.

Prostate enlargement affects about 85 per cent of men over the age of 50, causing frequent urination and irritation due to the obstruction of urine flow. The drugs available for treatment aim to either relax the prostrate or to reduce its size as two separate actions, and also have undesired hormonal effects.

These effects, along with the need to take two separate treatments, often lead to problems of patient compliance.

The discovery by the UCL scientists is novel in that this new drug can both relax the prostate and stop it from growing, with virtually no hormonal side-effects.

Dr Selim Cellek, who led the investigation as a collaborative work between UCL's Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research and its Institute of Urology and Nephrology, said: "We are very excited by this discovery, as it is a medical breakthrough which represents a major advance in treating a condition that affects such a large proportion of the population.

"We are still at the development stages and more research will be required before the new treatment becomes available. The next step will be to develop links with investors interested in developing this drug.

Research has shown that this type of compound can also be used to treat erectile dysfunction (impotence). The future for this line of research is therefore promising, since men with an enlarged prostate often suffer from impotence," added Dr Cellek.