What was Lilly Thinking

The Current Status of Cancer Vaccines: An Overview

You might have mentioned that all of the therapeutic cancer vaccines that have reached phase III clinical trials induce an immune response and that to date all of these cancer vaccines have failed to show benefit in phase III in the prospectively selected patient group and have failed to be approved. So far, I have seen nothing that makes me think dendritic approaches will be any more successful. After all Provenge failed its first phase III trial, but in retrospect a subset of patients seem to have benefited, so a second phase III trial was initiated, which failed to show a benefit in the prospectively selected subset of patients from the first trial. However, in the second trial a subset of the subset, seem to show a benefit. Get the point. If you have enough money to run phase III trials eventually you will find a very small number of patients who might benefit, but there is a background of prostate cancer patients and many other cancers who will survive a longer period than the general patient population and if you do not prospectively select patients in a trial you will eventually find these longer survival patients in your treatment arm and your drug will look like it has a survival benefit. All the cancer vaccines have had similar issues during their development, which eventually proved to be of no benefit. I wish companies with the tenacity of Dendreon would move on to find cures for cancer rather than trying to get by with just another immune modulator.