ditch effort," Kaminski said. "What this is showing is if you treat the patients earlier, you get much more durable remissions without having to put the patient through chemotherapy after chemotherapy." Bexxar, marketed in the United States by GlaxoSmithKline, combines an antibody that seeks out cancer cells, and a radioactive form of the element iodine. When injected, it travels through the bloodstream to bind to a protein found on the surface of the cancerous cells. The radiation zaps these malignant cells with minimal exposure to normal tissues. The researchers said that in 75 percent of patients treated with Bexxar, all traces of the cancer disappeared. And more than three-quarters of patients with a complete remission were disease-free after five years. While the latest findings may appear promising, they are not definitive because the treatment was not compared to conventional chemotherapy. In an editorial in the Journal, Joseph Connors of the British Columbia Cancer Agency, said the results are not impressive enough to make Bexxar a first-line treatment -- at least not without further study. Connors said the study tested the treatment on "a highly selected group of younger-than-average patients" who did not have a lot of cancer to start with, and what they did have was growing fairly slowly.
