Cuban Faces of 2015: The Team That Developed A Vaccine Against Lung Cancer / 14ymedio

The Center of Molecular Immunology in the Playa district in Havana. (CIM)
The Center of Molecular Immunology in the Playa district in Havana. (CIM)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 30 December 2015 — Under the name of Cimavax, Cuban has spent more than 25 years developing a vaccine against lung cancer. This year, the drug produced by a team at the Center of Molecular Immunology jumped into the public arena when the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, after a trade mission to Cuba, returned to his country proposing to import the product.

The center managed to sign an agreement in September 2015 with the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo to bring Cimavax to the United States and start clinical trials there. Its managers hope to validate the results of a study conducted in 2007 on patients with stages 3 and 4 lung cancer, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The article reports on the drug’s safety and its ability to increase production of tumor-reducing in more than half the cases and without significant side effects.

So far more than 5,000 patients worldwide have been treated with Cimavax, 1,000 of them in Cuba.