Dr. R. Bruce Johnson

R. Bruce Johnson, M.D., Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group

"Immunotherapy for colon cancer hopefully has an exciting future," said R. Bruce Johnson, a gastroenterologist with Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group."This study gives us a glimpse of the potential benefit when patients are ‘immunized" by their own cancer cells.

"We eagerly await further refinements of this science to show equal or better results on patients with positive lymph nodes or widely metastatic disease," Dr. Johnson said.

Patients received two injections of the vaccine and a final dose of irradiated tumor cells alone at set intervals beginning three or four weeks after surgery, and then were followed for more than seven years.

While overall survival rates were not significantly better in those patients who received the vaccine, patients who were sensitive to the vaccine, as measured by a skin test at the site of the injection, fared much better.And the more sensitive they were, the better they did, according to the researchers.

Overall, the five-year survival rate was about 63 percent, but in patients showing the greatest immune response, 85 percent survived five or more years, compared to 45 percent of patients who showed the mildest sensitivity to the vaccine.