Wednesday, December 31, 2003

New arsenal in fighting cancerous tumors

When patients are first diagnosed with cancer, the news is hard to hear. That’s because intuitively we all know that, in spite of the progress against cancer, the disease still kills many people. Patients usually die following the recurrence of cancer, not from the first cancer.

CEL-SCI Corp. wants to change that. To that effect, their researchers, along with other cancer researchers, have just published a unique new finding that may serve to make the first cancer treatment more successful, thereby reducing the risk of the dreaded recurrence of cancer.

Their non-toxic immune system-boosting drug Multikine was just shown to significantly increase the susceptibility of cancer cells to radiation therapy. This is very important because radiation therapy is a mainstay of cancer therapy. Its limitation, other than toxicity, is that only about 10 percent of cancer cells are susceptible to the radiation at any one point in time.

Data recently published in The Laryngoscope highlights clinical trial results demonstrating that pre-treatment with Multikine renders the great majority of the remaining cancer cells highly susceptible to follow-on radiation therapy. Imagine that you could wipe out over 50 percent of the cancer cells in the first treatment as opposed to the current 10 percent.

Data currently available on the follow-up of eight sequentially treated patients at one center showed that none of the Multikine treated patients presented with recurrence of disease at 24+ months after Multikine treatment. This contrasts with the scientific literature which reports that up to 50 percent of primary head and neck cancer patients will recur within 18 to 24 months after surgery and/or radiation therapy. The company is planning large-scale clinical studies to prove that the drug works.

This new finding may change the way doctors treat cancer. If Multikine is proven to reduce the recurrence rate of head & neck cancer, it is likely that Multikine will be included in the first line therapy of many cancers.

“There are about 650,000 radiation treatments for cancer in the U.S. every year,” said Dr. Eyal Talor, senior vice president of research and manufacturing at CEL-SCI and the corresponding author of the study, “and the addition of Multikine to radiation therapy may help make these treatments more successful.”

To learn more, visit www.cel-sci.com.