Each shot would be completely personalized to the patient.
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Wagner’s TLPO cancer vaccine has been tested in hundreds of patients with advanced forms of melanoma in Phase 2 clinical trials.
The most recent data presented at an academic conference showed nearly 95% of people given only the vaccine were still alive three years after starting treatment and 64% were still disease-free. Among the most advanced forms of melanoma, disease-free survival after three years for people with stage III disease was 60% in the vaccine-only group, compared to about 39% in the placebo group. Disease-free survival for those with stage IV disease was about 68% in the vaccine-only group, and zero in the placebo group.
The most common side effects were redness or pain at the injection site, fever and fatigue after the injection – similar to other vaccines that stimulate an immune response.
For melanoma at the moment.
However, it is a TLPO vaccine which teaches your immune system one of the tricks cancer uses to evade being taken care of by your white blood cells. So it’s application could be huge.
That said, as you might have noticed, it has to be personalized for the patient as it targets the specific way your cancer is hiding itself. Personalized medicine is still very expensive, but quickly being able to ID the specific sequence of DNA that gave your cancer it’s hiding ability could be something that computers help us with one day.
So if this does get approved, it will likely be incredibly expensive per patient.
Almost every medical treatment we have was incredibly expensive when it first appeared, so I’m not terribly upset by that. As you say, the fundamentals of this are something that can be made a lot cheaper with advancing technology and mass adoption.