As always in such cases, the announcement must be accompanied by all the usual precautions. Starting with the clear affirmation that it is in no way a miracle treatment that will overcome lung cancer.
The results published Monday, September 11 in the journal Annals of Oncology by the company OSE Immunotherapeutics and Professor Benjamin Besse of the Gustave-Roussy Institute may even seem modest since the average survival gain in these treatment-resistant patients is only around three and a half months. However, the result certainly appears positive: at the end of a phase 3 clinical trial, the Nantes start-up announces that the therapeutic vaccine it designed reduces the risk of death at one year by 41% in patients suffering from resistant lung cancer with metastases compared to the chemotherapy treatment usually administered.
A cancer vaccine? The term may surprise. In reality, and unlike the usual prophylactic vaccines, it is indeed a treatment. It is therefore administered to sick people. But to fight the disease, it uses the same principle as our good old vaccination: it presents “antigens” which resemble the proteins contained in tumors and thus educates the killer cells of the immune system. From then on, these T lymphocytes will be able to recognize the right targets and eliminate them.
Advances in immunotherapy
This vaccine is not the first treatment using our own immune system. For ten years, what is called immunotherapy has made immense progress. Various treatments have thus succeeded in removing the brakes that cancer usually places on our killer cells. They entered the usual arsenal to fight against the terrible disease, alongside surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.
But many patients develop resistance to these treatments. These are the people this new treatment targets: patients in the advanced phase of “non-small cell” lung cancer, suffering from metastases and resistant to dual treatment with chemotherapy and immunotherapy. To these patients, a new chemotherapy is usually administered. It is to this treatment, called third line, that the vaccine called Tedopi has been compared.
Patients from nine European countries, drawn at random to benefit from the vaccine, received a subcutaneous injection every three weeks, on six occasions, of the product designed around five small proteins (peptides) similar to those found on tumors ; then the injections were spaced every eight weeks for a year; finally every twelve weeks. Result: they display a median survival of 11.1 months compared to 7.5 months for the control group. In other words, half of patients live beyond 11.1 months once treatment begins.
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