49packard,
Don't give your negative thoughts to rule your life. You are doing fine. I am sue with PROVENGE and other drugs you will have many years ahead.
I read three days ago very interesting interview with Mark Frohlich , Dendreon’s executive vice president of research and development and chief medical officer:
"Individualised approaches to medicine".
He said:
" One of the challenges is that the way the therapy works is different from traditional therapies. Immunotherapies stimulate the immune system in the body, which then targets the cancer. It therefore takes time for that immune system to build and to be able to fight the cancer.
In contrast to traditional therapies like chemotherapy, you may not see the tumour shrinking or tumour markers going down, or effects on short term markers like disease progression.
Our immunotherapy, Provenge, has been demonstrated to prolong overall survival. Because it is the first and only approved active immunotherapy for cancer, physicians and patients need a lot of education to help them understand that they can still be benefiting from the therapy, even if the tumour is not shrinking on an imaging scan or a tumour marker measured in the blood isn’t decreasing. We have shown that Provenge prolongs overall survival in randomised phase III trials, even without measurable effects on disease progression measures...
I think that’s going to be a gradual educational process. The success of other immunotherapies, such as ipilimumab for metastatic melanoma, has helped people to appreciate that this is a growing trend, which is really going to revolutionise the treatment of cancer. Immunotherapy has the benefits of being very effective, prolonging overall survival. In the case of Provenge, the therapy is of very short duration, administered in approximately 1 month, and has a very favourable safety profile.
You don’t have the toxicities associated with chemotherapy that may require growth factor support, hair loss or other side effects, and sometimes hospitalisations. Those things can reduce a patient’s quality of life and also contribute to the cost of care too. These are factors that are often not fully appreciated when people compare an innovative, personalised immunotherapy approach with traditional approaches such as chemotherapy."
www.pharmaphorum.com/2012/10/02/individualised-approaches-medicine-dendreon/There is interesting research paper "Toward Maximizing Immunotherapy in Metastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer – Rationale for Combinatorial Approaches Using Chemotherapy" by Dr.Slovin.
In this paper, an exploratory analysis of phase III trial (PROVENGE) participants found a substantial survival benefit to receiving docetaxel some months after sipuleucel-T:
"An exploratory post hoc analysis of docetaxel with or without early sipuleucel-T found that there was a benefit to receiving docetaxel some months after sipuleucel-T. Median survival was 34.5 months for patients who received sipuleucel-T followed later by docetaxel (N = 51); 25.7 months for crossover placebo recipients who also received docetaxel (N = 21); and 20.2 months for placebo patients who received docetaxel without ever receiving a vaccine product (N = 10). The adjusted survival hazard ratio (HR) for the first of these groups compared with the others was 2.53 (P = 0.006; Petrylak et al., 2007; Petrylak, 2011)."
So we see:
PROVENGE + CHEMO = 34,5;
FROZEN PROVENGE ( crossover placebo patient ) + CHEMO = 25,7;
PLACEBO + CHEMO = 20.2;
IT is very impressive.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3362835/?tool=pubmedIn 5 days you will see doctor and certainly he has plan for you. Take care yourself. It is the most important right now.
Post Edited (HOPENEVERDIE) : 10/8/2012 6:19:05 AM (GMT-6)