“We really are in a transformative moment,’’ said Dr. Glenn Dranoff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a medical oncologist and immunologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Prostate cancer patients were the first to benefit. A therapeutic vaccine called Provenge received federal approval last year after studies showed it safely extended the lives of advanced prostate cancer patients for an average of 4.1 months.
Then came a vaccine called Yervoy, designed to attack melanoma, a particularly dangerous form of skin cancer.
Cancer generally turns down the body’s immune response to a tumor; Yervoy is designed to turn it back on, enhancing the immune system’s ability to kill cancer cells.
Many more cancer vaccines are under development, with hundreds of trials underway in patients with breast, prostate, lung, kidney, colon, cervical, brain, and pancreatic cancers, as well as lymphomas. Once companies confirm the effectiveness of these therapies in one type of cancer, they are likely to try them in others.
“From the immune point of view, the distinction between one cancer type and the next is not so important,’’ said Dranoff, who did early work on Yervoy. “That’s part of why so many companies now are developing these agents.’’
The market responded enthusiastically when Provenge, made by Dendreon Corp. of Seattle, was first approved in April 2010, and that drove excitement around other potential vaccines.
The fervor has since cooled, as sales fell well below expectations. But the drug’s $200 million or so in revenue still puts its first-year sales among the top five or six ever for a cancer product, according to the company president and chief executive, Dr. Mitchell H. Gold.
The vaccines have substantial price tags: Provenge is on the market for $93,000 for three treatments and Yervoy is $120,000 for four treatments.
Developers insist those costs are in line with chemotherapy’s costs and worthwhile because they block cancer from spreading or recurring, at least for a while.
