Prostate Cancer

They irradiate them to stop them from dividing.

"That's crucial.

They're alive but unable to divide," says Peter Working, a cell biologist and senior vice president of the company.

"You don't want to give someone a dividing, growing cancer." The next step is to add a special gene to the cells.

This gene makes the leukemia cells secrete a molecular signal that lures immune cells, just as bait attracts fish.

Then the juiced-up leukemia cells are injected into the body of a leukemia patient.

Lured by the molecular signal, the immune cells smack right into the cancer cells.

This forced face-to-face encounter makes the immune cells react to the cancer, which ordinarily they would ignore.

The cells then speed off to tell the rest of the immune system about this new invader and how to recognize it.

And the immune system goes on the attack.

The company uses the same basic approach for vaccines against prostate and pancreatic cancer.

It has seen some patients gain six extra months of life compared with patients who got standard cancer drugs.

But "we're not making claims yet based on this data," says Working.

"We need bigger trials, which should be finished in 2008 or 2009." David Berd tells a similar story about the melanoma vaccine he's developing, M-Vax.

Berd is a medical oncologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

His approach is to remove a ...

Read more...