NEW BRUNSWICK — Like many parts of the body, the pancreas — a six-inch gland in the abdomen which helps produce enzymes for digestion — is an overlooked niche player when it’s working correctly.
Overlooked… until something goes catastrophically wrong. Pancreatic cancer is a particularly deadly and quick-moving cancer that is the fourth-leading cancer killer in the United States, with 44,000 new cases expected this year – and 37,400 deaths, according to the American Cancer Society.
But at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick, researchers have stabilized the chaotic disease through direct injection of a virus-vaccine into the tumor – work which has earned them a “highly-rated” distinction for work in progress at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in Chicago this week.
Four of six patients are currently still alive and clinically stable for as much as two years after the experimental use of the vaccine, made with the equivalent of the eradicated smallpox virus.
The immune system, which is normally pinned down and paralyzed by the pancreatic tumor, is effectively freed from the stranglehold and strengthened to fight the tumor, said Edmund Lattime, the Cancer Institute of New Jersey’s deputy director and the study’s senior researcher.
“Considering pancreatic cancer only carries a five-year, five percent survival rate, these findings are very encouraging and will hopefully lead to more effective ways of managing and treating this disease,” said Lattime.
Two patients were taken off the vaccine trials two weeks after starting the regimen, and died one and six months after they stopped the trial.
But the four survivors are still clinically stable, against most expectations. Pancreatic cancer carries a five-year survival rate of just 5 percent, according to the American Cancer Society.
“We’re just tickled that these people are doing well,” said Elizabeth Poplin, a professor of medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey – Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Cancer vaccines are thought to be a promising new area of development and research – both for preventing certain forms of the disease, and treating existing tumors. Several preventive vaccines are already in common usage: including Gardasil and Cervarix, cervical cancer vaccines for young women, and a Hepatitis B vaccine to prevent eventual liver cancer has been given to most newborns in the United states since it was approved by the FDA in 1981.
The first cancer vaccine for directly treating existing cancer was Provenge, which fights metastatic prostate cancer in men, according to the National Cancer Institute. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in April 2010. Yervoy, the trade name of a second cancer vaccine, is being used to treat melanoma, and is currently being tested on about 700 patients in a nationwide clinical trial.