No. Just looked at the ASCO videos yesterday. According to an I village post, DNDN's Dave Urdal is scheduled to make a presentation on Provenge's potency marker in January 07. Hopefully, in the 11 months elapsed at that time since Dr. Provost's presentation, there will a lot of additional data and analyses done.
When asked by the CBER Advisory Committee in February why CD54 was chosen as a potency marker for Provenge and why it should be correlated with long term survival, DNDN's Dr. Provost replied in a self deprecating manner that perhaps DNDN was just lucky.
Luck seldom figures in this sort of things - just lots of grunge work. Dr. Urdal discussed the antigen cassette technology and the role of CD54 at the Workshop on Tumor Vaccines in 1998. He'll likely talk about the CD54 data from the trials in the Cell & Gene Therapy Forum in Baltimore in Jan 2007.
"Now what I'd like to suggest in the next couple of slides is an alternative way of actually looking at some of the co-stimulatory markers and their expression and picked CD-54 by means of example, that it not only serves as a means by which we can quantify dendritic cells that have been induced to maturate in these cultures, but it's also a marker that is associated with the potency and capacity of these cells to actually interact with naive T-cells."