A Vaccine for Breast Cancer
Recently developed personalized breast cancer treatments have dramatically improved survival rates. But there’s a group of aggressive breast tumors that don’t respond to these therapies. They’re called triple-negative breast cancers and fail to respond to the usual hormonal cancer therapies. So, patients are left with conventional treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.
Triple-negative breast cancer makes up 15 percent of all breast cancers and is among the most aggressive. However, a new vaccine could change the outlook for these women and it’s based on neoantigen DNA.
Cancer neoantigens are tumor cell proteins recognized and targeted by our immune system. These DNA vaccines recognize the patient’s uniquely mutated proteins and prompt the immune system to attack.
A clinical trial enrolled 18 women with stage one cancer and had chemotherapy and surgery to remove the tumor. Tissues from the tumor and new software tools identified the mutation. Then a personalized DNA cancer vaccine was made for each patient which helped her immune system to “target” her cancer cells. After three doses, three-quarters of the women developed an immune response and nearly all remained cancer-free after 3 years compared to historical controls where only half the patients remained cancer-free in that time.
If the safety study works out, this vaccine could be life-changing for women with these aggressive cancers.
More Information
Vaccine shows promise against aggressive breast cancer
Clinical trial targeted recurrence of hard-to-treat triple-negative breast cancer
New therapeutic vaccine gives hope against an aggressive breast cancer
An experimental vaccine could offer fresh hope to women diagnosed with an aggressive and hard-to-treat form of breast cancer, new research suggests.
Neoantigen DNA vaccines are safe, feasible, and induce neoantigen-specific immune responses in triple-negative breast cancer patients
Neoantigen vaccines can induce or enhance highly specific antitumor immune responses with minimal risk of autoimmunity. We have developed a neoantigen DNA vaccine platform capable of efficiently presenting both HLA class I and II epitopes and performed a phase 1 clinical trial in triple-negative breast cancer patients with persistent disease on surgical pathology following neoadjuvant chemotherapy, a patient population at high risk of disease recurrence.