provenge median 4.5 months looks like a failure to me.
http://www.prostateprogram.org/metastatic.html
Half of men treated with hormonal therapy will develop disease that no longer
responds to hormone treatment within three years of instituting therapy."

The lung one
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00480025
GSK1572932A Antigen-Specific Cancer Immunotherapeutic as Adjuvant Therapy in
Patients With Resectable MAGE-A3 Positive Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer
Disease-free survival at 2, 3, 4 and 5 year [ Time Frame: After first study
treatment.
The purpose of this clinical trial is to demonstrate the benefit of the
immunotherapeutic product GSK1572932A when given to patients with Non-Small Cell
Lung Cancer, after removal of their tumor. A course of 13 injections will be
administered over 27 months. The Protocol Posting has been updated in order to
comply with the FDA Amendment Act, Sep 2007.
Male or female patient with completely resected, pathologically proven stage IB,
II or IIIA NSCLC.
Administration of adjuvant platinum-based chemotherapy for the treatment of the
current NSCLC is allowed between surgery and randomization.
The surgical technique for resection of the patient's tumor is anatomical,
involving at least a lobectomy or a sleeve lobectomy;

They're cherry-picking. We'll see. I don't have the medians for those at hand
Nor the (results of) Phase I and II trial results..
J

Here's the answer about vaccines.
We Fought Cancer…And Cancer Won.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/157548/page/1
After billions spent on research and decades of hit-or-miss treatments, it's
time to rethink the war on cancer.
Fighting Cancer: A Timeline

http://www.newsweek.com/id/157548/page/2
In the high-powered labs funded by the war on cancer, molecular biologists
thought they could change that. By discovering how genetic and other changes let
cancer cells multiply like frisky rabbits, they reasoned, they could find ways
to stop the revved-up replication at its source. That promised to be more
effective, and easier on healthy cells than chemotherapy drugs, which also kill
normal dividing cells, notably in the gut, bone marrow, mouth and hair
follicles. In the 1970s, cancer scientists discovered cancer viruses that alter
DNA in animals, and for a while the idea that viruses cause cancer in people,
too, was all the rage. (The human papilloma virus causes cervical cancer, but
other human cancers have nothing to do with viruses, it would turn out.) In the
1970s and 1980s they discovered human genes that, when mutated, trigger or
promote cancer, as well as tumor suppressor genes that, when healthy, do as
their name implies but when damaged release the brakes on pathways leading to
cancer.

It made for a lot of elegant science and important research papers. But it "all
seemed to have little or no impact on the methods used by clinicians to diagnose
and treat cancers," wrote Varmus. Basic-science studies of the mechanisms
leading to cancer and efforts to control cancer, he observed, "often seemed to
inhabit separate worlds." Indeed, it is possible (and common) for cancer
researchers to achieve extraordinary acclaim and success, measured by grants,
awards, professorships and papers in leading journals, without ever helping a
single patient gain a single extra day of life. There is no pressure within
science to make that happen. It is no coincidence that the ratio of useful
therapy per basic discovery is abysmal. For other diseases, about 20 percent of
new compounds arising from basic biological discoveries are eventually approved
as new drugs by the FDA. For cancer, only 8 percent are.