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Lymphoma Vaccines
Vaccine's for Non-Hodgkin's LymphomaThese are a very promising science, but one that is still in the clinical trial stages. Just like the name suggests, vaccines are an attempt to prevent relapses. Most of the vaccine trials are focusing on the indolent varieties of NHL at this time. Vaccine therapies have experienced several major setbacks with the failed results of the two biggest vaccine treatments. Both the Genitope and Favrille clinical trials failed in their primary endpoints in their trials, and both companies are now bankrupt and out of business.
The BiovaxID vaccine from Biovest has shown success. They announced their clinical trial results in August 2008. Here is their press release. In October 2008 Biovest announced further news from their unblinded study data, that the results were significant enough to request permission from the FDA to treat the placebo group with BiovaxID. There are still other vaccine treatments in clinical trials or in laboratory studies. Here is some information about some of them.
Idiotype: You will see the term "idiotype" used often in cancer vaccine research. Idiotype refers to the unique set of antigens that are expressed on the surface of each patients cancer cells. If you can isolate those specific antigens then you can use them to manufacture a vaccine against them, just like we can manufacture vaccines against specific viruses.
Genetically modified T-cell vaccineBelow is a description of this line of research from one of the researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. The quote is from 2004 but the research is more up to date.
We are conducting phase I trial for patients with relapsed follicular NHL using "killer" T-cells that have been genetically modified to recognize the CD20 marker on lymphoma cells. We extract a patient's T-cells from the blood, insert a gene into the T-cells in the laboratory so that they recognize CD20, grow the cells to large numbers in the lab, and then reinfuse these genetically modified cells back into the patient. We have treated 2 patients so far and hope that T-cell immune therapy against lymphoma will be better than the current antibody based therapies. We are conducting studies targeting other lymphoma markers and using T-cell immunotherapy for other types of lymphoma.
Here are some links about the above trial.
A Detailed look at adoptive T-cell therapies
Plant produced idiotype vaccines for fNHLIn this line of research they are using plants to produce the vaccines much faster than they can in the laboratory. Here is a link to a recent study on this topic. Vaccines prepared in one dayOne of the difficulties of the Favrille and Genitope vaccines was that they were time consuming and expensive to produce. Each vaccine took about six months to prepare. The following study attempts to address this issue. This vaccine can be made in a single day and it still uses a patient specific vaccine. Additional information about lymphoma vaccinesThe following two articles are from the the Journal Blood, and the journal Bloodline. Both are authoritative resources for anything haematology related.
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