Prima reports 100 per cent success in cancer trial

A treatment to encourage the immune systems of cancer patients to attack the disease has proven 100 per cent effective in early stage results.

Cancer Vac, a subsidiary of Prima Biomed (ASX: PRR) announced interim results from its Phase I clinical trial had shown patients treated with its vaccine had demonstrated increased T-cell production, enabling the body to recognise cancer cells as foreign.

Eight of the 10 patients involved in the study have so far been analysed to deliver the interim results, with final results expected at the end of the year.

Prima Biomed chief executive officer Marcus Clark said that, until now, the production of tumour specific T-cells had been difficult.

Clark said Cancer Vac had licensed an immune system stimulant that had been demonstrated to produce the cells, which have the capacity to move through tissue to destroy solid tumours embedded in organs and tissues.

"We are attempting to help the body's own immune system fight cancerous tumours by developing both a product (an immune stimulant) and a process (immune system manipulation) that will make the body recognise cancer cells as foreign and thus lead an attack to kill them," he said.

"The results that have been recorded in this trial are the best we have seen in terms of immune system response."

Clark said the preliminary results had been accepted for publication at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in the USA later this month.

In the study, patients gave blood, which was then separated and the immune cells were manipulated before being reinjected into the patient.

An analysis of the first eight patients to receive the treatment showed that, after three cycles of treatment, they produced a tumour specific immune response rate in 100 per cent of cases. The analysis also demonstrated no treatment-related side effects.

The researchers plan to continue monitoring patients for nine months after treatment to keep an eye in sustained T-cell responses, tumour marker presence in the blood and the effect of the therapy of the extent of the cancer.

Clark said the next stage of the study would aim to examine the extent to which the treatment turned back or stabilised the cancer.

"We are now in the process of designing a further phase I/II study in a larger patient group to demonstrate such activity," he said, adding that this phase was expected to begin in the third quarter of the year.

Scientists at the Austin Research Institute, Melbourne, developed the Cancer Vac technology over the past decade.