MONDAY, May 19 (HealthDay News) -- The new adenovirus/PSA (Ad/PSA) vaccine -- which stimulates the immune system to produce anti-antigens and attack cancer cells -- shows promise for men with metastatic prostate cancer. In addition, baseline prostate-specific antigen (PSA) readings are reliable predictors of prostate cancer and may be especially important for black men with a family history of the disease, according to research presented this week at the Annual Meeting of the American Urological Association in Orlando, Fla.

David Lubaroff, M.D., of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and colleagues conducted a phase I study in which they tested the Ad/PSA vaccine in 32 patients with stage D2 or D3 prostate cancer. They found that more than 40 percent of the patients developed immune responses to PSA, with 42 percent producing anti-PSA antibodies and 71 producing anti-PSA T-cell responses. Although median survival was 18 months, one patient survived for 71 months.

In a second study, researchers in New York and Malmo, Sweden, studied a group of men who submitted blood samples for a cardiovascular study during 1974-1986 when they were age 50 or younger. During follow-up, the researchers found that a PSA reading taken at ages 44 to 50 predicted prostate cancer diagnoses up to 30 years. In a third study, researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago analyzed 1991-2001 data on 329 black men with a family history of prostate cancer. The study authors found that none of the men in their 40s and 50s developed prostate cancer if their baseline PSA level was below the age-specific median, while 8 percent of men in their 40s and 16 percent of men in their 50s developed cancer if their PSA was above age-specific median.

"A phase II trial, designed to expand on our initial findings, has recently been approved by the FDA," Lubaroff's team reports.

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