Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access originally published online on February 12, 2008
JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2008 100(4):237-238; doi:10.1093/jnci/djn030
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© Oxford University Press 2008.
NEWS |
Rethinking Cancer Vaccine Trials: Would New Measures of Success Make a Difference?
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Jeffrey Schlom, Ph.D., is wary of what he calls "paradigm paralysis" for judging the value of a cancer vaccine. To date, no therapeutic cancer vaccine has earned U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. Schlom, chief of the laboratory of tumor immunology and biology at the National Cancer Institute, hopes to change that by honing a different view of success.
| |||||||||||
Writing last year in Clinical Cancer Research, Schlom and his colleagues argued that even though cancer vaccines have yet to show evidence of spurring a patient's immune system to shrink tumors, patients receiving them (mostly in randomized phase II trials) tend to live longer and respond better to chemotherapy or hormone treatment. Such observations have Schlom and others questioning if it's more appropriate to think about vaccine effectiveness as how patients respond rather than by how much a tumor shrinks.
"The classic criteria for measuring the
New Endpoints
Combination Therapies