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| 12) How can a vaccine work for Pancreatic Cancer?
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We have created this section of our Web site to explain the new pancreatic
cancer
vaccine developed at Johns Hopkins. We hope this section adds to your
understanding of how the vaccine is made and how it works.
View the animation in
Flash format
or
quicktime
This cancer vaccine, unlike vaccines for childhood infections, is a vaccine
used to treat existing disease. Pancreatic cancer must already have been
diagnosed for this vaccine to work. The vaccination causes an immune response that targets the pancreatic cancer.
We can think of this as a battle between the immune system and the pancreatic
cancer.
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the vaccine, a phase 2 clinical trial began in October of 2001 and is still ongoing. As much as we would like to offer the
vaccine to everyone, eligibility criteria had to be established for this
study. Patients with adenocarcinoma of the pancreas who have surgery at Johns
Hopkins Hospital to remove their pancreatic cancer and who have no clinical
evidence of spread of the cancer outside the pancreas are eligible for
this study. Patients with bile duct cancer or neuroendocrine tumors or islet
cell cancer are not eligible.
Please contact Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee (ejaffee
@jhmi.edu), Dr. Dan Laheru (laherda@jhmi.edu), or N.P. Barbara Biedrzycki, (biedrba@jhmi.edu) for more information
on eligibility criteria.
Read the article in Hopkins Medical News
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This site is supported by generous educational grants from
the Vesalius Trust
