In today’s Wall Street Journal, Mark Thornton, M.D., Ph.D. deplores the FDA’s decision on Dendreon’s sipuleucal-T immunotherapy (Provenge vaccine). Dr. Thornton says “May 9, 2007, should be cited in the annals of cancer immunotherapy as Black Wednesday. Within an eight-hour period that day, the FDA succeeded in killing not one but two safe, promising therapies designed and developed to act by stimulating a patient’s immune system against cancer. The FDA’s hubris will affect the lives and possibly the life spans of cancer patients from nearly every demographic, from elderly men with prostate cancer to young children with the rarest of bone cancers.”
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The Seventh International Prostate Cancer Congress to be held at The Fairmont Turnberry Isle Resort & Club in Aventura, FL from July 27-29 will include presentations on prostate cancer immunotherapy and vaccines by urologist Paul Schellhammer, Professor of Urology at Eastern Virginia Medical School and consultant to Dendreon, Corp., and oncologist Susan Slovin, a Memorial Sloan- Kettering immunologist who is working on bivalent and multivalent vaccines targeted at different arms of the immune system. Program details:
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