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The Food and Drug Administration officially approved the first cancer treatment vaccine. Provenge, created by Dendreon, helps treat advanced cases of prostate cancer. According to the American Cancer Society more than 192,000 men are diagnosed with the disease each year and more than 27,000 die from it.
We're looking at perspectives from CBS, ABC, CNBC, NPR and WebMD.
CBS explains the new treatment step-by-step.
REPORTER: "The treatment is tailor-made for each patient. Immune cells are taken from the blood stream, sent to a lab, and mixed with a protein found in prostate cancer. Those immune cells, now prime to attack the cancer, are then injected back into the body where they help destroy the tumor."
REPORTER: “The company has reported that a study of over 500 patients shows those getting the vaccine survive 4.1 months longer than those taking placebo."
DR. PHILLIP KANTOFF: "This is not a prevention of cancer, this is a treatment of cancer."
ABC's Senior Medical Editor explains how the vaccine could help patients at every stage of the disease.
DR. RICHARD BESSER: "The real value though in terms of future treatment, may be in addition to those treatments like surgery and chemotherapy and radiation. At the end of that if you give this vaccine, maybe your body can go around and mop up any remaining little cancer cells.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: "Other kinds of cancer as well?"
DR. RICHARD BESSER: "Well that's the hope. There are researchers who are looking at this for different kinds of blood cancer and breast cancer, and the hope is that you can take your own immune system and use it to fight these cancers that are so hard to treat.”
CNBC's Chief Science Correspondent highlights the price of the vaccine and what it means for other types of cancer.
"The company is saying it will cost $91,000 or so for the three — $93,000 for three treatments. It is an expensive treatment... There are big supply problems with this because of that individualized treatment and they have to scale up production enormously. As far as the how well it will work for other cancers, you have to just wait and see on a cancer by cancer basis. That's the problem with developing these biological therapies. You just have to wait and see whether they work, and often times they disappoint."
Experts say many prostate cancer patients could benefit from the vaccine but NPR points out the problem of Dendreon's limited supply.
"Every minute of life is precious, and men with advanced prostate cancer have few treatment options... Even modest demand could overwhelm the initial supply. In the first year, Dendreon, maker of Provenge, says it will only be able to provide enough of the stuff to treat about 2,000 patients, at a back-of-the-envelope cost of $186 million. Still, within a few years some analysts figure annual sales could top $1 billion."
Finally, WebMD looks ahead, at what Provenge means for cancer research as a whole.
"It will 're-energize' work in a field that is littered with disappointing failures. Ongoing clinical trials are looking at whether Provenge might have more dramatic effects if given earlier in the course of prostate cancer."
So will this be the first of many cancer vaccines to come or is this a one in a million shot?
