Australia's Mater Medical Research Institute is in Phase I clinical trials with a prostate cancer vaccine that it believes could be approved in five years. The researchers are using technology to "educate" cells to target prostate cancer, directing the human immune system against the disease. The cancer vaccine would be used along with standard therapy such as chemo.
"In terms of being available in routine practice, it's likely to take at least five years before it would be widely available to patients," says MMRI director Professor Derek Hart says. "We know a patient's immune system has failed if they have got cancer, but we also know now that we can take components of the immune system out and then educate the immune system to go back and fight the cancer."
- read the article in the Sydney Morning Herald
ALSO: Researchers at the University of Southern California have developed a prostate cancer vaccine that prevented the development of cancer in 90 percent of young mice genetically predestined to develop the disease. Release
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