Dstock, I certainly agree that our vaccine should fight any tumor it's manufactured from, but I'd add in most cases it needs the support of other therapeutics to cure them. DCVax-L alone may have a survival benefit, but without additional trials we really don't know if it's better than the current SOC alone. It's very possible that certain SOC products can effectively be removed from the treatment when using DCVax-L, but others, such as Poly-ICLC and/or Keytruda should be added. I would suspect that as DCVax-L is added to the treatment of other solid cancers there will be a great deal of experimentation with what can be added, or eliminated, to make the treatment most effective.
Many years ago at a pancreatic cancer event I was invited to attend I met a elderly gentleman of substantial means who'd lived for over 5 years with pancreatic cancer without the Whipple procedure. His success in staying alive came was simple, find an Oncologist who believes he can keep you alive, follow his guidance until such time as it's no longer working and he has nothing more to offer, then find another Oncologist who has something more to offer. I believe he went through several Oncologists, much of his treatment was completely unorthodox, but he was alive and if age hasn't gotten him may still be.
I don't believe that we'll ever find courses of treatment that cure all with a given form of cancer, I believe there will always be variations and people will need to have their treatment modified to stay alive, and hopefully reach a cure. In some cases, I believe that once a patient becomes refractory to SOC treatment another treatment that has limited success may be all that's needed to return to the SOC treatment and again have extended benefits before becoming refractory again. Nearly 40 years ago IMGN had their first generation ADC in a trial, it was an MAB linked to blocked ricin, it was not humanized, a large molecule, and almost instantly refractory patients became refractory to it, but they were no longer refractory to the SOC, so people lived longer. Could such a product gain approval for essentially resetting the cancer, perhaps, but certainly it wasn't deemed sufficient to continue commercial development with trials who's goal would have shown it to be something that could only be used once or a very few times. Frankly this is the sort of thing the pancreatic cancer's oncologist may have done to essentially reset the cancer so prior therapies would be effective again. No company is going to go for an approval of their product to be used in this way, yet it might extend the lives of many patients.
Gary
