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  • 2017-07-27 (xsd:date)
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  • Does Cuba Have a Cancer Vaccine That Has Already Cured Thousands? (en)
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  • On 7 July 2017, TheNativePeople.net published a story reporting that Cuba has been evidently sitting on a cancer vaccine that has already cured thousands of people. In the article, which has since been shared thousands of times, the author writes: The treatment this story highlights does indeed exist in Cuba. It's a therapy (named CIMAvax) used to treat lung cancer, and which has begun being used in clinical trials in the United States. The treatment, contrary to the suggestion of the headline, is not meant to prevent the future occurrence of disease like a traditional vaccine. Vaccine, in this case, refers to the fact that CIMAvax provokes an immune response — as with a vaccine — which then signals a person's own immune system to attack the cancer’s ability to grow (as opposed to inoculating against future outbreaks). As described in a November 2016 feature in The Atlantic: The drug, which was originally developed by the Cuban Ministry of Public Health in the 1990s, has undergone several animal and human clinical trials in Cuba, and is currently licensed there for stage IIIB/IV non-small-cell lung cancer. The most recent Cuban trial, a phase III study of 405 individuals with this kind of lung cancer, concluded: While these results are promising, claims that thousands have been cured of cancer as a result of this drug are unsupported by published research, and appear to stem from reports that 5000 people have been treated with the drug since 2011. Indeed, improvements to survival were generally on the order of months, and around 20 percent of cases from these clinical trials showed no improvement compared to control groups. Due to regulations stemming from the United States embargo on Cuban goods, the drug has been unexplored in the United States until fairly recently. In late 2016, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York received approval to embark on a collaboration with Cuban researchers to bring CIMAvax clinical trials to the U.S., capping a lengthy process to get approval from the Obama Administration that began in 2011. In addition to Cuba, CIMAvax has been used in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru. Michael Caligiuri of the American Association for Cancer Research told PBS Newshour that success in Cuba does not necessarily mean the drug will be met with similar success in the United States: The U.S. trials began in January 2017, and researchers are currently recruiting participants. If the drug’s efficacy is demonstrated by the standards of the U.S. Food and Drug administration, Roswell Park Cancer Institute scientist Kevin Lee says it could potentially change the way in which doctors approach cancer treatment by targeting not the cancer itself, but by changing a body's ability to contain a cancer that it was previously unable to combat: While the drug is real and has shown promise against a specific kind of lung cancer, claims that it is a blanket cure for all of cancer overstate both the scope of the drug and the nature of its clinical success. Therefore, we rate that claim that Cuban researchers already have a cancer vaccine that has cured thousands of people as a mixture. (en)
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