HOUSTON -- While the Food and Drug Administration has approved a vaccine that is being used right now to fight prostate cancer, a similar vaccine is being developed in the Texas Medical Center that may prove to be even more effective against the disease.
The results among a handful of men in phase one trials have been astounding, experts say.
"Our goal is to cure cancer," said Dr. Kevin Slawin of Memorial Hermann Hospital.
Slawin has spent 10 years working on the cancer vaccine, called BPX 101. It is made from a patient’s own immune cells, in a five-day process that sounds like science fiction.
"And over five days we turn those immune cells, we purify them and turn them into a specific type of immune cell called the dendretic cell," he said.
Slawin says dendretic cells are like adding boosters to your immune system.
Doctors say cancer is very good at turning off the immune system, and the vaccine turns the tables -- jump-starting the immune system so it can fight back.
Early results prove the vaccine is doing just that. In one patient's case, a tumor shrank 20 percent in three months while the patient was on the vaccine.
Dean Key is part of the clinical trial. Doctors are testing the vaccine on patients with advanced prostate cancer, and Key has been battling the disease since 1996. He said conventional treatments, like chemotherapy, haven't worked.
Key's condition has stabilized after 10 months on the drug, but he is one of only six people who've taken the vaccine.
If doctors can duplicate the success with hundreds of patients, there is a chance the vaccine will be available to the public in about five years.
