The first cancer treatment that harnesses the power of a patient’s immune system to fight tumors won government approval Thursday, a step scientists and patient groups hailed as what could be the beginning of a new era in cancer therapies.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Provenge, sometimes called a “cancer vaccine” because it stimulates the immune systems of men with advanced prostate cancer to attack their malignancies.
While the benefit of the approach is modest — extending the lives of patients by a few months — it was welcomed by researchers and patient advocates who had fought for years for the approval.
“The availability of Provenge provides a new treatment option for men with advance prostate cancer, who currently have limited effective therapies available,” said Karen Midthun, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in announcing the approval.
Researchers said they hoped it would be the first in a series of similar treatments for other cancers. Unlike a standard vaccine, which is given before a person gets sick to stimulate their immune system to fight off infections, Provenge is an example of “therapeutic vaccine,” which is designed to attack cancer cells in a person’s body. Similar vaccines are showing promise for a variety of other cancers, including breast cancer, lung cancer, melanoma and lymphoma.
“This is great news,” said Philip Kantoff, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School who helped study Provenge. “This is really a proof-of-principle that you can harness the immune system and fight cancer. This is something the world has been working on for decades.”
Prostate cancer strikes 192,000 men in United States each year and kills about 27,000, making it the second most common type of cancer.
