The patients had no adverse reactions. Each patient receives an injection of purified material derived from his or her own cancer, with no drug or chemical added. To obtain the patient-specific solution, the surgeon removes the tumor from the patient, freezes it, and sends it by express mail it to the laboratories in Woburn. There, the chaperone and associated peptides are purified and returned to the clinical site. And it's a relatively inexpensive process.
More clinical trials are underway.
A clinical trial in patients with kidney cancer also will soon be completed at MD Anderson. We're still at the stage of proving the principle and testing safety, but we've seen immune responses in a number of patients. We're beginning to think about a large, pivotal trial. Due in 1999 The clinical development of molecular chaperones as vaccines against viral diseases is also moving forward. Rather than using the patient's own cells, this vaccine will be produced in human cells infected with the herpes virus in vitro .