The search for a cure for cancer has become the holy grail of medicine over the years. However, with the only two cancer vaccines currently available – one targeting HPV, whose strains can cause cancers such as cervical cancer, and one targeting hepatitis B, which can cause liver cancer – achieving this dream is particularly difficult.
Now, a breast cancer vaccine in human clinical trials has set itself the goal of reversing the situation.
The vaccine is designed to prevent the recurrence of triple-negative breast cancer, which accounts for about 10 to 15 percent of all breast cancers and is particularly difficult to treat. In this case, the problem is that the cancer cells don’t have estrogen or progesterone receptors or enough HER2 protein, which is what the most effective treatments for breast cancer focus on.
It is also one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer because it grows quickly and has a higher rate of recurrence, both locally in the breast and elsewhere in the body, meaning metastasis. In fact, patients with triple-negative breast cancer have nearly three times the risk of their cancer returning within five years of diagnosis than patients with non-triple-negative breast cancer.
Therefore, there is no doubt that a vaccine to prevent the recurrence of this type of cancer would be a huge game changer.
Jennifer Davis, a 46-year-old nurse and mother of three who lives in Ohio, was the first person in the world to receive the vaccine in a clinical trial. We’ll explain why you decided to participate and how the vaccine works.
Why do you want to participate in a breast cancer vaccine trial?
For Davis, this is a personal matter. She was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer in September 2018. Shortly after her diagnosis, she began cancer treatment at the Cleveland Clinic, which included a double mastectomy and rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.
He learned about the breast cancer vaccine trial, now 20 years old, based on research led by Vincent Tuohy, who died in January 2023 during a follow-up appointment at the Cleveland Clinic. In fact, human trials of the vaccine began in October 2021.
“My medical team told me about the vaccine that Dr. Toohey has been developing for a long time,” Davis tells Yahoo Lifestyle. They told him the trial was in the human phase and was being conducted at the Cleveland Clinic. “That’s lucky,” he said.
Triple Negative Breast Cancer “I didn’t know much about it before I was diagnosed,” she shared, “but when you go through it, you learn a lot. It’s that type of breast cancer, that special type, you can’t eat anything after that, no tamoxifen (a hormone therapy), and the relapse rate is very high. If it happens again, the outcome will be bad. So I want to do something about it, and the vaccine is what I s answer.”
Additionally, as a nurse, Davis understands that clinical trials are “very important.” “That’s how we make progress in medicine, we make small changes until one day we no longer have breast cancer,” he said.
What is it like to participate in a clinical trial?
As part of the trial, which is funded by the Department of Defense, “it won’t be more than three years since the first dose of chemotherapy,” Davis explained. “The second condition is that there are no signs of recurrence. So I have to undergo some tests.”
When Davis was accepted into the trial, she along with 15 other women received three injections, each two weeks apart. “They do lab testing before every injection,” he noted. “Other than a bump at the injection site, I didn’t have any side effects, so it was just like any other vaccine.”
Davis had two follow-up appointments as part of the trial and remains at Cleveland Clinic, where he received his final dose of the vaccine in November 2021. So far, the cancer has not returned.
What impact have the vaccines had?
“It changed my life,” Davis admits. “I no longer think about relapse every day.”
This is a great achievement because, as Davis explained, when you are diagnosed with a cancer like this, you don’t forget it. “I’m not going to say you’ve never thought about it,” he admitted, but based on blood tests and Davis’s immune system response, “the fact that it’s working and the cancer hasn’t returned yet,” rest assured. “About relapse.”
“He’s put those thoughts aside. Now I can really enjoy a good life,” he said.
Davis also considered the positive impact the vaccine might have on other women with triple-negative breast cancer: “I’m excited to be a part of this because we may one day be able to eliminate it,” she said.
What do the experts say?
Vaccines are medical tools that use the immune system to help the body protect itself from certain diseases. So it seems counterintuitive that the women participating in the vaccine’s initial human clinical trials already had triple-negative breast cancer. However, current vaccines aim to prevent the recurrence of the same cancer that has a high recurrence rate.
Amit Kumar, president and CEO of Anixa Biosciences, said 42 percent of women with triple-negative breast cancer will develop the cancer again within five years. The company received approval to produce the vaccine being tested by the Cleveland Clinic. “It’s usually more aggressive, so the results for these women aren’t great,” she confesses to Yahoo Lifestyle. The aim of the breast cancer vaccine is to “eliminate recurrence in these women and ultimately prevent the cancer from developing again.”
Kumar said that while our focus is currently on triple-negative breast cancer because “it is the deadliest form,” “eventually we hope to conduct clinical trials in other types of breast cancer. “We may be able to eliminate breast cancer as a disease. , just like we eradicated polio and smallpox in the United States. “
How does the breast cancer vaccine work?
Justin Johnson, program director at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Institute, explained that the vaccine trains the immune system to recognize alpha-lactalbumin, a beneficial protein typically found in breast milk. “In healthy tissue, alpha-lactalbumin is produced only in the breast and during breastfeeding,” she explains to Yahoo Lifestyle. “However, breast tumors often also express alpha-lactalbumin, especially triple-negative breast cancers.”
As Kumar points out: “This protein only shows up in cancer if women don’t breastfeed.”
Johnson explained that the vaccine helps the immune system “recognize and attack” emerging cancer cells by targeting specific proteins. “The vaccine can provide safe and effective protection against breast cancer for women of childbearing age,” he noted.
How promising are the results so far?
The Phase 1 clinical trial began at the Cleveland Clinic two years ago, and “to date, we have vaccinated 16 women, all triple-negative breast cancer survivors,” Johnson said. “Side effects are usually mild and mainly include irritation at the injection site. “Our data so far show that we have produced robust alpha-lactalbumin in most subjects even at the lowest dose tested. Targeted immunity. “
Johnson added that while a successful immune response is critical for preventing tumors, “we still don’t know if the vaccine will be clinically effective. “We plan to monitor subjects for breast cancer recurrence over the long term. “
“The ultimate goal of this research trial is to develop a vaccine that can prevent breast cancer in humans,” Dr. G. Thomas Budd of Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute, a principal investigator on the study, said in a statement. . It’s an ambitious goal, but that’s what we hope for. There are many steps you must take before reaching this point. This may not work, but it is one of those 1,000-step journeys that must begin with the first step. So we are taking the first steps. “
If larger clinical trials show good results (followed by a phase 2, scientists hope to involve a different group of patients). Kumar believes a vaccine could be available within five years “for women like Jenny Davis who already have cancer and are worried about it coming back.”
But he noted that the vaccine is still in the early stages of human testing. “We want to do the proper research and make sure it’s safe,” he said. “You have to make sure it has very few side effects.”
Still, for people like Kumar and Davis, it’s hard not to think about what having an effective breast cancer vaccine might mean. “It would be great if we could get women to take three shots and eliminate cancer, triple-negative cancer and eventually breast cancer,” Kumar said. “It will also change the way cancer is researched.”
Rachel Grumman Bender