Tuesday, May 04, 2010

FDA approves $93K prostate cancer "vaccine" -- BMJ

Published 4 May 2010, doi:10.1136/bmj.c2431
Cite this as: BMJ 2010;340:c2431

News

FDA approves prostate cancer "vaccine"

Janice Hopkins Tanne

1 New York

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The US Food and Drug Administration last week approved the first therapeutic "vaccine" against cancer.

Provenge (sipuleucel-T), made by Dendreon, a company in Seattle, Washington, does not prevent cancer. The individualised treatment is designed to induce a patient’s own cells to attack metastatic prostate cancer that is causing few or no symptoms but that no longer responds to hormone therapy.

Trial results show that Provenge extended men’s lives by an average of 4.1 months, in comparison with a control group, and reduced the risk of death by 22% (hazard ratio 0.78 (95% confidence interval 0.61 to 0.98)).

Each year in the United States about 192 000 cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed and about 27 000 men die from the disease.

The treatment costs $93 000 (£60 000; {euro}70 000) for the three doses, given about two weeks apart.

Drug industry analysts said that the drug may be a "blockbuster," . . . [Full text of this article]

Posted via web from Jack's posterous

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is Hannah Bevills, I am an editor with Hospital.com. We are a medical publication whose focus is geared towards promoting awareness on hospitals, including information, news, and reviews on them. Given the relevance of what you are offering from your site and what our mission is, I feel we may be able to collaborate in some way or another, I look forward to your response regarding the matter. Thanks!

Hannah Bevills
hannah.bevills@gmail.com
Hospital.com

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