Washington: A tailor-made cancer vaccine may help patients with pancreatic cancer, who have few other options to treat the deadly disease, researchers reported on Saturday.

Most of the patients who got the vaccine survived at least two years, Dr. Daniel Laheru of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues told a meeting of gastrointestinal cancer specialists.

In the phase II study of 60 patients, 88% were alive a year later and 76% lived two years. In comparison, 63% of patients treated with surgeryalone survive a year and 42% live two years.

"Our initial review suggests that the vaccine could provide additional benefit over chemo-radiotherapy, but prospective randomised trials are needed to confirm this observation," Laheru said in a statement.

Chemoradiation therapy involves chemotherapy and radiation together, and is done after surgery. Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers. Laheru's team concocted a therapeutic vaccine, one that fights a disease by boosting the immune system rather than preventing the disease.

He presented his findings to the 2007 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium in Orlando, Florida, co-sponsored by the American Gastroenterological Association, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology, and the Society of Surgical Oncology.

The team took cells from the patients' tumours, killed them using radiation, and then genetically engineered them so they would produce a compound called GM-CSF. GM-CSF attracts immune cells to the vaccine site, where they find and learn to recognise pancreas cancer proteins.

Then the immune cells patrol the rest of the patient's body and, in theory, destroy pancreas tumour cells. A second team reported bad news, adding Avastin, a drug that starves tumours of their blood supply, to the standard chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer did not help patients live any longer.

Dr. Hedy Kindler of the University of Chicago and colleagues tested Avastin, known generically as bevacizumab. It was developed by San Francisco-based Genentech and is sold by Roche.

Their phase III trial of 600 advanced pancreatic cancer patients added Avastin to the standard treatment, Eli Lilly and Co's Gemzar. But those given Avastin did not live any longer than those given Gemzar alone, both groups lived about six months, Kindler's team told the meeting.

"These results were quite disappointing," Kindler said in a statement. "This trial definitively shows that bevacizumab does not improve survival in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer."