Survival of Prostate Cancer Patients Increased by Trial Vaccine Made from Frozen Immune Cells

Metastatic prostate cancer patients who received an investigational vaccine made from their own frozen immune cells lived 10 months longer than those not treated with it, researchers from the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson have found.

In an exploratory, multi-institutional analysis, the researchers administered the vaccine APC8015F to a group of patients from the control arm of three randomized, Phase 3 clinical trials evaluating sipuleucel-T, a similar, FDA-approved cancer vaccine for metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer.

APC8015F is made from immune system cells taken from a patient with prostate cancer. However, unlike sipuleucel-T, which is never frozen, APC8015F is cryopreserved at a time before the disease progressed.

Results from the analysis showed that patients treated with APC8015F had improved survival relative to the patients who were not treated in the control arm.

Following disease progression, the median survival of patients treated with APC8015F was 20.0 months compared to 9.8 months for control patients.

"The study is important because it suggests that the sipuleucel-T therapy may have extended survival for a longer time than estimated in the clinical trials due to the beneficial effects of the frozen product on some men who initially received the placebo," said Leonard Gomella, Chair of Urology at Jefferson's Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

The study will be presented at the 2011 American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago on June 4.

Source: ANI