Prostate Cancer

Urdal, Dendreon's chief scientific officer and vice chairman.

The personalized component comes from a blood sample taken from a patient in order to isolate dendritic cells, which deliver antigens to T-cells and B-cells, the lymphocytes that control the immune response.

Those dendritic cells are then cultured with the general component, prostatic acid phosphatase, a recombinant protein found in 95% of The dendritic cells, now loaded with the antigen, are then injected back into the patient to trigger a reaction from the immune system.

Patients receive three doses of the vaccine over the course of a month.

The method appears to be offering patients some hope.

The combined data from two Phase III trials in androgen-independent patients showed that the vaccine extended survival by four months, a 23% improvement over a placebo.

And just over twice as many patients given the vaccine (33%) compared with those given a placebo (15%) were still alive 36 months after treatment.

Dendreon has also completed enrollment in a Phase III trial in patients with the earlier stage and milder androgen-dependent "The idea is that Provenge would be most effective when the tumor burden is the smallest," Urdal notes.

There has also been evidence that administering the vaccine prior to chemotherapy rather than after it might be an effective sequence.

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