As many as three quarters of advanced ovarian cancer patients appeared to respond to a new two-step immunotherapy approach -- including one patient who achieved complete remission -- according to research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania that was presented April 6, 2013 in a press conference at the American Academy of Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2013 (Presentation #LB-335) in Washington, D.C. The immunotherapy has two steps – a personalized dendritic cell vaccination and adoptive T-cell therapy. The scientific team reports that in the study of 31 patients, vaccination therapy alone showed about a 61 percent clinical benefit, and the combination of both therapies showed about a 75 percent benefit. The findings offer new hope for the large number of ovarian cancer patients who relapse following treatment. The first step of the immunotherapy approach is to preserve the patient's tumor cells alive, using sterile techniques at the time of surgery so they can be used to manufacture a personalized vaccine that teaches the patient's own immune system to attack the tumor. Then, the Penn Medicine team isolates immune cells called dendritic cells from patients' blood through a process called apheresis, which is similar to the process used for blood donation. Researchers then prepare each patient's personalized vaccine by exposing her dendritic cells to the tumor tissue that was collected during surgery. Because ovarian cancer symptoms can be non-obvious and easily mistaken for other issues – constipation, weight gain, bloating, or more frequent urination – more than 60 percent of patients are diagnosed only after the disease has spread to their lymph nodes or other distant sites in the body, when treatment is much less likely to produce a cure compared to when the disease is detected early.Login Or Register To Read Full Story