watch out world... here comes immunotherapeutics!!!

dana faber puts out the first fda approved immunotherapy for prostate cancer! its called provenge and instead of being a prophylactic vaccine, its is an interventional treatment for men who already have prostate cancer. what happens is that the patient's white blood cells are extracted (leukapheresis) and APCs are primed with antigen from the cancer. the cells are then reintroduced into the body and... THIS IS SPARTA!! haha :p get it?

compared to placebo, provenge improved median survival by 4.1 months, improved 3yr survival by 38% and reduced the overall risk of death by 22.5%!!!

in the next year, this will become available to men with advanced, metastatic prostate cancer that is hormone resistant. certainly this type of therapy requires a lot of individual tailoring but wow! researchers expect that tens of thousands of men will benefit from this.

i think that in our clinical practice, we should all expect to see more immunotherapies arise and become powerful tools in our arsenal of interventional and curative abilities. our immune system is so finely tuned to discriminate friend from foe so what better way to fight disease than to harness this potential and make it even more focused! lets just help our body do what it does best.

ch- ch- check it out! http://www.provenge.com/