2023-09-11 17:02:23
As always in such cases, the announcement must be accompanied by all the usual precautions. Starting with the clear statement that this is in no way a miracle treatment that will cure lung cancer.
The results, published Monday September 11 in the journal Annals of Oncology by the company OSE Immunotherapeutics and by Professor Benjamin Besse, of the Gustave-Roussy Institute in Villejuif (Val-de-Marne), may even seem modest, since the average survival gain in these treatment-resistant patients is only regarding 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” that it has designed reduces the risk of death within one year in patients by 41%. suffering from resistant lung cancer with metastases compared to the chemotherapy treatment usually administered.
A vaccine once morest cancer? The term may surprise you. 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 it with 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. Over the past ten years, what we call immunotherapy has made immense progress. Different treatments have thus succeeded in removing the obstacles that cancer usually places on our killer cells. They entered the usual arsenal of fighting 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, further chemotherapy is usually administered. It is to this treatment, called “third line”, that the vaccine, called “Tedopi”, was compared.
The patients drawn at random to benefit from the vaccine, coming from nine European countries, thus 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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