Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer with a poor prognosis rate. But a new study suggests that a vaccine could help prevent recurrent cases of that disease.
Dr. Mital Patel is medical oncologist with Dignity Health Cancer Institute at St. Joseph's Medical Center. He says the early results of this phase one trial are promising.
"And then when they started to look at the effect of it, the efficacy of it, followed these patients for two to two-and-a-half years," he said. "They saw that the patients who got the vaccine, their cancers came back less compared to historical controls."
The overall survival rate of pancreatic cancer is anywhere between 10% and 13% and it can reoccur, which makes the vaccine even more exciting.
"A vaccine has always been reviewed as the holy grail," Patel said.
He says in this trial, researchers used a vaccine to rev up the immune system and target a certain protein found in patients with pancreatic cancer.
"Once we have a robust immune response above a particular threshold — the immune system continues to look for, monitor, manage, even suppress and kill these cancer proteins in the body," he said.
On average, patients lived for more than two years and went more than 15 months without their cancer returning — a longer remission than typically seen, even after surgery.
