Hi all
I like Leslie's comment on twitter " extremely happy" and especially "observing responses".
One of my biggest questions I have had knocking around in my head lately is how many of these partial responses (the 5 patients having had greater than 30 percent reduction in tumor size) can you credit Her- vaxx with? and how much might be attributable to the Chemo?
Being curious to find out ( and try to add my own control arm of sorts to IMU's trial ) I have been searching for information to try and find out what might be the expected response rate to chemo alone.
I was not able to find much on the subject, but I was able to find what looks like some sort of a scholarly article which summarizes the same three chemo drugs as used in the trial (Cisplatin and either Fluorouracil (5-FU) or Capecitabine) hopefully giving me something meaningful to go on for comparison.
The article, is as far as I can understand, indicates that the typical (for a partial response ) response rates to these drugs are typically in the 10 - 20 % range and some studies suggest as high as 19 - 21 % , but then later, however unfortunately with chemo alone after these partial responses which last several months the cancer would be expected to return.
So it kind of indicates to me that without the Her-vaxx we might have expected to see a partial response in 1 or 2 patients receiving chemo alone so I am very happy that it this stage we have 5 and hopefully we will see further improvement from both this group as well as from the other group which reported as disease stable.
the article can be read here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4066028/
I think that some have taken the words partial response as meaning it hasn't worked very well, this is because people want to see a cure, the thing these people need to remember is that you can't expect the cancer tumor to just completely disappear in only 56 days I think it might take a whole year or so to that, maybe some of these tumors are already on the road to recovery and hopefully many of the patients that were reported as disease stable given a bit more time, find their tumors melt away.
fp
(20min delay)
