Alan Gomez and Liz Szabo, USA TODAY
A landmark agreement to allow an American cancer institute to begin testing a lung cancer vaccine developed in Cuba could be the start of a renewed medical research relationship between the two countries.
Cuba has long been a surprising leader in the development of medical treatments, from laying the groundwork to cure malaria to more recent advances in biotechnology to battle meningitis, hepatitis, diabetes and cancer.
But Cuban researchers have mostly been unable to share their experiences with their American counterparts because of the economic embargo the U.S. has maintained on the Communist island for more than a half-century.
Now, as President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro move to normalize relations, their countries are starting to team up on medical research. Federal restrictions on working in Cuba and sending medical equipment there are being loosened as part of the deal, meaning more Cuban scientists can visit the U.S., more American researchers can spend time in Cuba, and the scientific bond between the two countries can be re-established.
The first step in the new relationship was an agreement between the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo to test a vaccine developed by Cuba's Center for Molecular Immunology. Roswell Park plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration for permission to conduct a trial here, said Roswell Park president and CEO Candace Johnson.
The Cuban vaccine resarchers are "an extremely innovative group of scientists," said Johnson, who finalized the deal during a trip to Havana last month. "They're just brimming with ideas."
International scientists have been experimenting with cancer treatment vaccines for many years, and one is already approved in the USA to treat prostate cancer. The Cuban vaccine, called Cimavax, attacks the problem in a different way, said Kelvin Lee, Roswell Park's chairman of immunology.
Rather than attack the tumor itself, the vaccine — already approved in Cuba and Peru — is designed to starve cancers of growth factors that act like fertilizers to help them grow. The vaccine contains a man-made protein, called epidermal growth factor, or EGF, that fuels the growth of tumors in the lung, colon and other organs, Lee said.
In clinical trials conducted in Cuba, most patients with advanced lung cancers who received the vaccine lived two to four months longer than those who didn't receive it. Patients who had the most EGF protein benefited the most, getting an extra eight to 10 months of survival, Lee said. About 5,000 patients have received the vaccine worldwide, including 1,000 in Cuba.
This early success has even led some American lung cancer patients to fly to Cuba to receive the vaccine, Lee said.
That kind of innovation is what's piqued the curiosity of American researchers like Mark Rasenick, a physiology and psychiatry professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago, who has visited Cuba for 20 years. The country has struggled economically for decades, forcing Cuban scientists to figure out how to prevent diseases in their own way.
Rasenick gives the example of a brain-mapping technique pioneered by underfunded Cuban scientists. In the U.S., if a patient has a stroke, doctors can use magnetic resonance imaging to see what is happening inside the patient's brain. The machine costs millions of dollars.
Rasenick said Cubans instead use an older, cheaper procedure known as electroencephalography — "basically a bathing cap with a bunch of electrodes." The procedure measures brain activity only on the outside of the brain, so the Cubans developed sophisticated algorithms that have successfully used that data to determine what's going on inside the brain. Total price tag: $20,000.
Rasenick said the cheaper technology could help people in rural parts of the U.S. where doctors don't have access to the multimillion-dollar machines. And others say that level of ingenuity could help U.S. scientists approach problems from a different perspective.
