RSS Feed
April 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda TUESDAY, April 17 (HealthDay News) — A vaccine made from brain
cancer patients’ own tumor cells led to a nearly 50 percent improvement in
survival times for those stricken with glioblastoma multiforme, the same
malignancy that claimed the life of U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, a new study
suggests.
A phase 2 multicenter trial of about 40 patients with recurrent
glioblastoma — an aggressive brain cancer that typically kills patients
within 15 months of diagnosis — showed that the vaccine safely increased
average survival to nearly 48 weeks, compared with about 33 weeks among
patients who didn’t receive the treatment. The six-month survival rate was
93 percent for the vaccinated group, compared with 68 percent for 86 other
glioblastoma patients, who were treated with other therapies.
“We’ve done a lot of things for this kind of tumor in the last 40 or 50
years, all variations on different chemotherapies that haven’t really
panned out,” said Dr. Jonas Sheehan, director of neuro-oncology at the
Penn State Cancer Institute, who was not involved in the study. “What
we’ve known needed to happen for a while now is a revolution — a totally
new way of approaching these tumors. This is an example of a totally new
paradigm.”
The study is scheduled to be presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of
the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS), in Miami.
About a quarter of the 18,500 brain tumors diagnosed each year are
glioblastomas, which are more common in men and typically occur between
the ages of 50 and 70, according to the AANS. Kennedy died of the
malignancy in 2009, 15 months after his diagnosis. Surgery, radiation and
chemotherapy are among the standard treatment options.
The vaccine used in the trial, known as HSPPC-96, was created with
tumor cells from patients who had undergone surgery to remove as much
tumor as possible. The vaccine was then injected into their bodies to
induce an immune response against the tumor, said lead investigator Dr.
Andrew Parsa, vice chairman of neurological surgery at University of
California, San Francisco. Side effects among participants were
minimal.
“It’s the concept of chronic therapy, to turn this into a chronic
disease like hypertension and diabetes,” said Parsa, who noted that no
drug companies funded the study. “It’s the only therapy in the clinical
realm that has a reasonable chance of doing this, because we can’t give
patients chemotherapy [because of toxicity] for unlimited amounts of
time.”
Parsa said the vaccine’s impact, if validated with a randomized study
in the near future, could be a “total game-changer.”
Added Sheehan: “The hope is that we’ll go from a survival of 15 months
to a meaningful difference. We’re looking to go from 15 months to five
years, a quantum leap forward.”
Because this study was to be presented at a medical meeting, the data
and conclusions should be viewed as preliminary until published in a
peer-reviewed journal.
More information
Visit the American Association of Neurological Surgeons for more on glioblastomas.
Posted in 
Tags: 
