Immunotherapy Vaccine is Giving Hope to Early-Stage Breast Cancer Patients

Researchers may have found a way to help the body’s immune system to fight off cancer. This process is called immunotherapy, and cancer researchers are making great strides in helping cancer patients through the study of immunotherapy. In January 2017, the Moffit Cancer Center announced that they were working on a new vaccine for early-stage breast cancer patients who have HER2 positive disease.

The American Cancer Society defines HER2 as a growth-promoting protein on the outside of all breast cells. Breast cancer cells with higher than normal levels of HER2 are called HER2-positive. HER2 positive cancers grow and spread faster than other types of breast cancers, and it is over-expressed in about 25% of breast cancer tumors.

Researchers at the Moffit Cancer Center, led by physician-scientist Brian J. Czerniecki, M.D., Ph.D., discovered that as breast cancer moves to a more invasive stage, the body’s immune cells are less able to recognize and target HER2 breast cancer cells. The research team has developed a vaccine that helps the immune system to recognize the HER2 protein on cancer cells using dendritic cells harvested from an individual patent and used to create a customized vaccine.

In an article on WNDU.com, Dr. Czerniecki describes the process of creating the individualized vaccines, which he has been developing for more than a decade: “It’s meant to restore an immune response,” explains Czerniecki.

To make the vaccine, white blood cells are removed from the patient. Then those T cells are activated to become immune responders that target cancer cells. The customized vaccine is injected back into the patient. It showed nice impact in that some people had their disease completely disappear before we operated on them.”

Some of the side effects of the vaccine could be fatigue, injection-site reaction and chills.

A clinical trial involving 54 women who have HER2-expressing, early stage breast cancer showed that the vaccine could stimulate an immune response 80 percent of the patients in the study. The researchers then tested the effectiveness of the vaccine by considering the number of patients who had detectable levels of disease after surgery on the tumor. When the disease can no longer be found, this is termed a pathological complete response. The researchers reported that 13 of the patients in the study had a pathological complete response.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded Mayo Clinic researchers $3.7 million to conduct a phase 2 trial of TapImmune’s HER2-targeted T-cell vaccine in 40 to 45 women with breast cancer. TapImmune is a bio-medical research company that is developing immunotherapies to fight cancers.  If this trial is successful, the new vaccine could replace chemotherapy and surgery to treat breast cancer. It could also be used to prevent breast cancer from developing according to Breast Cancer News.

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