3 New Treatments for Prostate Cancer
Filed Under New |
Three new treatments for prostate cancer, a vaccine, cryosurgery and a clinical experiment, look hopeful in the view of the physicians who performed them.
The new vaccine, named Provenge, was tried during a study of 127 men with advanced prostate cancer. Of the 127, those who were given the vaccine lived 4 ½ months longer that the men who were given a placebo. The physician who performed the study, Dr. Eric Small, said of the group that 34 percent of the men who received the vaccine were still living after three years. Of those who did not receive the vaccine, only 11 percent survived.
Small said the treatment trains the patient’s immune system to fight tumors and, though it’s called a vaccine, it treats prostate cancer instead of preventing it. The phrase cancer vaccine, he said, describes a situation where a patient’s immune system immediately recognizes cancer cells and destroys them without doing any harm to normal cells.
Focal cryosurgery was performed on 20 men from 58 to 70 years old who suffered from prostate cancer. Nicknamed male lumpectomy, focal cryosurgery looks promising as a primary treatment for prostate cancer, doctors say. Even better, they added, there is little to no risk of a man becoming impotent or suffering from urinary incontinence, that is, enduring a too-frequent urge to urinate night and day.
The report on cryosurgery describes the procedure this way: the prostate tumor is frozen with a blast of argon gas, which destroys it. Best of all, the report said, it kills the malignant cells but saves the healthy tissue, as it does for the prostate gland.
After the 20 men in the study underwent the cryosurgery procedure, it showed that 19 of them had no evidence of cancer in later examinations between two and eight years. The physician said the procedure is competitive to normal radiation and prostatectomy surgery that prostate cancer patients endure, and may even be better. Also, he added, 80 percent of the men in the study avoided impotence and incontinence: two very common effects of traditional prostate cancer treatments.
Though it is not conclusive yet, a gene therapy for prostate cancer called AD5-TRAIL, has undergone a Phase I study to test whether the dosage can safely be given to patients. Thomas Griffith, Ph.D, an associate professor in the University of Illinois Department of Urology, and Dr. Richard Williams, the Rubin H. Flocks Chair in Urology, who also is professor in the university’s urology department, performed the clinical study.
The two men injected the cancerous prostates of three willing patients. After a 10-day waiting period, the prostates were removed and currently are undergoing an evaluation as to the effects. Williams said the preliminary results look promising because the three patients underwent the treatment without any detected side effects. “We hope the results will permit us to proceed with the research process,” he said.
The future looks hopeful for cancer patients as new and emerging technologies improve effectiveness of current treatments and new procedures are developed. Gene therapy may eventually be the most useful as it attacks the problem at it’s source, although perfection is still years away. Men who are diagnosed with cancer however will soon have a multitude of alternatives to the somewhat less than perfect radiation and surgeries available today.
Back to prostate cancer treatment.
Comments
Leave a Reply