May 26, 2010

UCSF will be the only Northern California medical facility to offer the newly approved prostate cancer vaccine Provenge. Provenge is the first cancer treatment vaccine to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The drug was tested on men with late stage prostate cancer. Patients receiving Provenge lived an average of four months longer.

The FDA has only approved the administration of Provenge to men who have cancer that has spread to other tissues. They must not be having any symptoms or only minor ones and they must be taking hormonal therapy.  In addition their PSA score must be increasing despite the hormonal therapy. That is a sign that the hormone therapy is not working.

Provenge does not shrink tumors much or decrease PSA levels, but further studies will be done to test Provenge’s effect when used on patients with earlier stages of prostate cancer and when used with other drugs.

UCSF was one of the centers conducting the phase three trials and a UCSF researcher, Dr. Eric Small helped develop Provenge. Initially it will be made available at 50 sites in the U.S.

For the next year or two the drug will be In short supply because the drug’s developer, Dendreon Corp. of Seattle is still building up its manufacturing capability.

Dendreon makes the drug from a patient’s own immune cells. Those immune cells are removed from a patient and “trained” to target a protein called Pap found on tumor cells in the prostate and on normal prostate cells.