Info for Lucanix compassionate use - 1251505

I'm sorry to hear about your mother. While you're waiting for a doctor to answer, I thought it might be helpful to link to a post Dr West wrote about compassionate use programmes:
http://cancergrace.org/cancer-101/2010/12/18/compassionate-use/
and a research briefing from Dr Govindan that covers Lucanix:
http://cancergrace.org/lung/files/2012/06/Govindan-Immunotherapies-for-…
There was a discussion on Inspire about eligibility which you've probably seen, dating back to the summer of 2012:
http://www.inspire.com/groups/lung-cancer-survivors/discussion/lucanix-…
The questions raised there were whether the company required a patient to have stable disease, and whether they were still running a compassionate use program at all. Hopefully someone here will have more recent information on these points. All best.

meanie, I think certain spring has given you about as much information as we have unless I was to just get lucky in the choosing a doctor who happened to know someone who was giving lucanix on a compassionate use program. I think contacting Lucanix directly may give you the best current information available. http://www.lucanix.org/aboutlucanix.shtml

Please let us know what you find.

Janine

I don't have any additional information about Lucanix, but I just wanted to inject my view of why the Lucanix compassionate use program hasn't been a priority for me. Lucanix has been the subject of optimism that I fear may not be met by actual results, which is what we saw with Stimuvax. I feel that the negative trial results from Stimuvax should provide a reminder that we would be mistaken in presuming that these unproven therapies will be valuable. I don't see that as a problem when the most appropriate alternative is no active treatment, but I don't personally favor a strategy that defers treatments that have a proven value in favor of a therapy that does not and isn't answering a clinical research question that will move the field forward.

-Dr. West

I have a question about the Lucanix trial. I was reading about it and noticed that if a person had a splenectomy, that would exclude them from the trial. Just curious, only because if this drug is ever approved, I would assume Tony couldn't take the drug due to having his spleen out in 1993? Back then, it was standard procedure to remove it. For a guy without his spleen, I am always amazed at how he never gets sick (other than lung cancer, haha) - meaning colds & flu. His blood counts consistently hang in there on all the different chemos thrown at him - except Taxotere. They dropped on that but he rebounded very quickly. Is it unusual that he has a very strong immune system even without a spleen?

I don't have enough of an expertise in immunology to say how much of an effect a splenectomy really has, but I think it's understandable that treatment with an immunotherapy wouldn't be presumed to be as likely to work in someone with a splenectomy. I don't think that means it couldn't work, but rather that you might want to ensure that the people in the trial testing the efficacy of a new immune-based treatment would have the best chance of benefiting from it.

-Dr. West