HAVANA, Cuba (CNN) -- Terminal lung cancer patients are living longer thanks to the world's first registered lung cancer vaccine, a leading Cuban scientist says.
Dr. Gisela Gonzalez has spent years researching the vaccine which the Cuban government approved for the use of the general public last year.
Gonzalez and her team have worked on developing the CimaVax EGF vaccine at the Cuban Center of Molecular Immunology since the early 1990s.
She says all those years of hard work have finally paid off as trials show that Cubans with lung cancer are living a little longer after having the vaccine.
"One of my early patients was a 32-year-old man when he started taking the vaccine. I had a son that age," the scientist told CNN.
"Now he's 35. He's living and working. He visited us the other day and said he's thinking about having kids."
Gonzalez says that more than 700 patients have received the vaccine over the years, many of them in seven clinical trials in Cuba, Canada and the UK.
More than 400 advanced lung cancer patients received the Vaccine CimaVax EGF in the trials, according to the Latin American News Agency.
The trials showed that the drug extended the life of terminal patients by an average of four months, and in some cases several years, compared with those patients who only received traditional therapies. Younger patients tended to fare better.
"It has the potential to be very important," according to Dr. Howard Burris, director of drug development at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, Tennessee.
He said the results were comparable to those being produced by two other lung cancer vaccines, GVAX and BLP 25, being developed in the United States.
"Larger trials will show there are subsets that it's very good for and for others it's not relevant," he said.
CimaVax EGF does not prevent or cure lung cancer. It is a therapeutic vaccine which stimulates the patient's body to make an antibody against the epidermal growth factor (EGF), which is a key driver causing lung cancer cells to grow.
It is used in conjunction with chemotherapy and radiation therapy which reduce the size of the initial tumor.
To read more - http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/19/cuba.cancer.vaccine/index.html
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