Breast Cancer Vaccine Could Bring Promise For The Future

A new vaccine may show promise for fighting against breast cancer, according to Clinical Cancer Research. The vaccine works by fighting the body's immune system to hone in on a protein called mammaglobin-A that's found almost exclusively in breast tissue. The protein's role in healthy tissue is unclear, but breast tumors express it at abnormally high levels according to past research. In fact, findings revealed that it was expressed in about 80 percent of breast cancer cases.

"Being able to target mammaglobin is exciting because it is expressed broadly in up to 80 percent of breast cancers, but not at meaningful levels in other tissues. In theory, this means we could treat a large number of breast cancer patients with potentially fewer side effects," said senior author William E Gillanders, in a news release.

Researchers conducted the first phase clinical trials to assess safety of the vaccine, involving 14 women with metastatic breast cancer in progress in half the women after about one-year to follow. They found that it slowed cancer progression.

The study showed that though immunity of subjects was lowered due to cancer and chemotherapy, the vaccine helped the body in posting an immune response.

"Despite the weakened immune systems in these patients, we did observe a biologic response to the vaccine while analyzing immune cells in their blood samples. That's very encouraging. We also saw preliminary evidence of improved outcome, with modestly longer progression-free survival," said Gillanders adding that the vaccine cannot be used when mammaglobin is not overexpressed.

"If we give the vaccine to patients at the beginning of treatment, the immune systems should not be compromised like in patients with metastatic disease. We also will be able to do more informative immune monitoring than we did in this preliminary trial. Now that we have good evidence that the vaccine is safe, we think testing it in newly diagnosed patients will give us a better idea of the effectiveness of the therapy."

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