
Cancer Vaccine, tailor-made for each patient, advances to Stage 1 clinical trial - checoivan
http://www.wgrz.com/news/article/152242/37/Roswell-Park-Makes-Major-Annoucement-on-Cancer-Vaccine
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DanielBMarkham
Disclaimer: I am not an expert and basically just some random internet person.
I've read several recently-published books on cancer, including "The Emperor
of all Maladies," (<http://amzn.to/xr2Mx1>) which I highly recommend.

We keep thinking we have a lock on curing cancer, but it continues to be very
elusive.

As I understand it, using automation to "debug" individual cancers is
scalable. That is, reading a cancer, adapting to it, and creating a vaccine is
something that can be done with increasing levels of detail as automation
increases.

So if they only show a 1% improvement, it's a strategy definitely worth
continuing. This is very much like the hacker who keeps playing around with a
broken method until it works -- only it's all automated. It very well may be
that we "learn" how to contain/control many cancers without having a
traditional understanding of them at all. Fascinating approach, and much
different from previous forays. Watch this space. Given the history, my money
says it's still going to be a long, hard slog -- perhaps decades, but still, a
promising approach.

~~~
loceng
I would hope we eventually start to put money towards prevention to reduce
cancer to begin with. Prevention will always be less cost and less suffering.

~~~
freehunter
Trouble is, preventing cancer is hard when we don't even know what causes
cancer. Obviously smoking is a big one and people have been working hard to
great success to eliminate it. How about cooked vegetables? Raw vegetables?
Processed sugar? Burnt pieces of meat? Cell phones/wifi? Sunlight? Artificial
light?

The reason it seems like everything causes cancer is because everyone is at
risk for cancer. Living is a cancer risk. A lot of people don't die from
cancer because they don't live long enough, but prevention will never happen.
Cancer is inevitable.

~~~
tremendo
_> A lot of people don't die from cancer because they don't live long enough,
but prevention will never happen. Cancer is inevitable._

Except of course for all those that do live long enough, I don't think the
centenarians and beyond die of cancer
[http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/60/7/862...](http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/60/7/862.short)

From what I can see at FastStats
<http://seer.cancer.gov/faststats/selections.php?series=age> incidence does go
up with age, but there's still plenty of cancers that happen at relatively
young ages, and if you look at the trend, going back to 1975 which is not that
much really, you can see a marked increase towards 1990 and then a
stabilization, which to me suggests it's quite likely that environmental and
lifestyle factors do come in play, as similar trends occur in other health
related issues (metabolic syndrome). Markedly lower Vit-D levels, our
increased consumption of n-6 poly-unsaturated fatty acids and processed foods,
all likely play a role.

I short, I agree with gp in that there is surely a bigger payoff in
prevention, but that doesn't mean that cures wouldn't be welcome too. I can't
agree that cancer is inevitable.

Edited to add links, formatting.

~~~
freehunter
>Except of course for all those that do live long enough, I don't think the
centenarians and beyond die of cancer

There are people immune to AIDS as well. These are the outliers. Just because
people die of disease before they get cancer doesn't mean they wouldn't have
gotten cancer otherwise.

>it's quite likely that environmental and lifestyle factors do come in play

Yes, I accepted that in my post. There are ways to increase your risk of
cancer. My opinion was that there is never a statistically relevant zero risk
for cancer. Prevention of cancer will never completely stop cancer from
forming unless we know and can avoid all possible risk factors of cancer
(impossible). Prevention is a good step, but finding a way to reverse cancer
is the only way to keep people from dying from it.

------
scotty79
My life partner has grade III brain tumor. Recently diagnosed and operated.
She took surgery well. Apart from slightly higher chance of mispronunciation
she feels as good as ever. It's interesting that you can live unchanged
without the part of your brain. Her brain had time to adjust while her tumor
was growing. She'll be starting irradiation and chemo next month.

I really hope this vaccine will be available and effective when her tumor
grows back.

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darkmethod
I'm proud to say that I work at Roswell Park. I'm one of five web developers
in the IT dept. I write internal applications focused on supporting the many
clinical trials happening here.

There is definitely a huge buzz going through Roswell's campus regarding this.

Here is the publicly available information regarding this particular Phase I
study.

<http://www.roswellpark.org/clinical-trials/list/191511>

~~~
daviddaviddavid
I'm curious, how do you like working there?

I'm a programmer in Buffalo, NY. I always check Roswell's "Available Careers"
and they always have to same two Programmer Analyst postings.

Do you have a chance to use cool technologies there? The postings mention
JSP/VB/blah.

I'd love to send in a resume to support meaningful work.

~~~
darkmethod
I've been at Roswell nine years. I intend to retire from here. I'm also a
Buffalo native and I can't think of anywhere else in the city I'd rather work.

Roswell is run similarly to a college campus (I've had previous experience
supporting NY State colleges), meaning there are many departments, each run
fairly independently of each other and each with different technical needs.

The departments usually fall in one of three categories: there is an
educational group that works with UB's medical campus, a clinical component
that treats patients, and obviously a heavy research component. During my time
here, there have been at least four startups/companies that have formed as a
result of research I've helped support.

Roswell currently has about 3,300+ employees. The Programmer/Analyst positions
you have seen are an attempt to fill needed positions in various departments.

Everyone's version of "cool technologies" is different. I'm of the opinion,
for the most part, whatever gets the job done thoroughly and accurately works.

In the past nine years I've written and maintain about 20+ applications in
VBscript, C#, Actionscript, PHP, Ruby, etc with the various associated
frameworks. Since every department requires something slightly different I've
had to adapt as needed. However, recently we've been running with an inhouse
PHP framework called Surebert which was/is written by a co-worker.

<http://www.surebert.com>

<https://github.com/surebert>

Interestingly enough for me, I've never written anything professionally in
Java, but a lot of my co-workers have.

Out of the five of us on the web team, I'm the Apple fanboy. So I'm on a
MacBook, iPhone, etc. Another one is on Fedora, another is using a Dell (ugh).
To each their own.

And Roswell lets me moonlight on the side. I've had fairly steady freelancing
gigs for a couple years now.

Interesting place to work. Good people. Very little complaints (nothing's
perfect).

~~~
daviddaviddavid
I appreciate this response so much. Thank you.

------
cperciva
Remember, stage 1 clinical trials are just "does this treatment accidentally
kill people" trials. They're a _long_ way off from testing to see if the
treatment actually works.

~~~
scotty79
Nobel laureate Ralph Steinman had some of this kind of vaccines tested on
himself when he got pancreatic tumor. He lived unusually long for this kind of
tumor and died of pneumonia.

There's piece about his fight in recent Scientific American.
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-
patient...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-patient-
scientist)

~~~
tibbon
Right, but that's the thing... some of these drugs might work for some and
kill other people unexpectedly. The efficacy for one person doesn't mean that
it wouldn't kill every other person that takes it, and looking at a sample
size of 1 (nobel laureate or not) doesn't make for good science or good
medicine.

~~~
Dn_Ab
This is exactly why personalized medicine, bioinformatics, computational
pharmacokinetics, etc is key for the future of medicine.

I am not a biologist but I imagine someday soon a scenario like this will be
possible: You have a model of the sites and interactions the drug targets, and
optimum biology - metabolism, target cells' proteomes etc. Measure these in
the patient and you can predict ahead of time the efficacy of the drug and
then optimize the drug's chemistry to be more effective for this individual.
With a better understanding of protein modelling and such you could do a
search for similar structures and compute the expected interactions and
optimize for personalized effectiveness.

------
bedris
There is already an FDA-approved therapeutic cancer vaccine that is sold by
Dendreon for the treatment of prostate cancer (Provenge). Like this Roswell
Park therapy linked to, Provenge also harnesses dendritic cells.

More info on Provenge: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipuleucel-T>

------
thetrendycyborg
Soon, everyone can smoke without worry.

------
splicer
Two words: zombie apocalypse

------
abtinf
Stage 1 clinical trials take healthy individuals, give them the drug, and wait
to see if it kills them. To go from stage 1, through stage 2 (which determines
effectiveness), through stage 3 (which determines safety for general
distribution) takes 10-15 years.

In other words, this is not news. There are probably hundreds of similar
clinical trials every year.

~~~
Gatsky
Not quite. Phase I trials often happen in patients with the disease, because
otherwise the data you get on toxicity aren't that relevant.

Definitive efficacy is established in a phase III trial, along with safety.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research

This trial is news-worthy for a few reasons. One is that the only documented
cases of cure of a disseminated cancer are proabably all due to an immune-
mediated attack (exceptions are lymphomas and testicular cancers which can be
cured with chemotherapy even if widespread). Vaccines are trying to exploit
this mechanism. Another reason is that most of the treatments we use in phase
I trials are poorly understood. The treatment employed in this study however
utilises a pretty simple and elegant approach - find something that only
cancer cells have, then try and bait the immune system with it.

