Pharma Blog Watch

The Rise of Immunotherapies (In the Pipeline)
In his blog, Derek Lowe discusses recent successes in prostate cancer immunotherapies — last week involving Dendreon's Provenge and this week involving Cell Genesys' GVAX. "You know, small-molecule folks like me are going to have to learn to deal with immunology."

"Both of these vaccines depend on production of GM-CSF-secreting cells (a powerful cytokine which stimulates white blood cell production and activity), but they're rather different otherwise," he writes. "Dendreon's Provenge is autologous, that is, derived from each patient's own cells, for one thing, while the Cell Genesys GVAX vaccine isn't individualized at all (that is, allogeneic)."

"Although I find these current results quite interesting, the field is still very young indeed. Companies are targeting prostate cancer because it's a nonessential organ (so it doesn't matter if the immune system trashes it), but they're also going to be going after tumors in rather more vital organs like the lung and pancreas."