We have been making tremendous progress in the development of new treatments for advanced prostate cancer. However, prostate cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths in men despite there currently being twenty-six (26) FDA-approved drugs for prostate cancer.
Despite this large number of newly approved drugs coming to market, we remain in great need of better treatments. Immunotherapy, a new type of cancer treatment has been more successful in cancers other than prostate cancer, despite the fact that the first FDA approved immunotherapy, Provenge is only for the treatment of prostate cancer.
In looking towards the future our current best immunotherapy hope is an investigational treatment named Prosca Vax, not to be confused with the recently failed treatment Prostavc.
In the last couple months, we have seen data from an early-stage study of twenty (20) men with prostate cancer who have a rising prostate specific antigen (PSA) after having had another treatment, a sign that the disease is coming back, aka a prostate cancer recurrence.
OncBioMune Pharmaceuticals hopes to change the prostate cancer treatment paradigm with its novel therapeutic cancer vaccine called Prosca Vax. Prosca Vax combines prostate cancer-associated PSA with two biological adjuvants (interleukin-2 and GM-CSF) to elicit t a response from the immune system directed towards the prostate cancer cells.
OncBioMune, the developer of Prosca Vax, released the latest results from a phase 1 study, showing the 80% (16 out of 20) of the men treated with had their prostate cancer stabilize/stop progressing at 19 weeks post-therapy.
This data was consistent with previously released data showing that 12 of 15 men exhibited an increased immune response and nine of 14 men showed improvements in their PSA doubling times.
Phase I research is very early, and the sample sizes are tiny so we need to contain our enthusiasm. Their analysis is also just looking at 19 weeks on treatment, and their data was not designed to evaluate survival or evidence of any scan progression.
