In a bit of exciting news, a vaccine created to prevent breast cancer will now undergo its first human trials after over two decades in development.
The vaccine, developed by the Cleveland Clinic, has been designed to target a specific protein (α-lactalbumin) commonly produced by triple-negative breast cancers, which amount to 15 percent of all breast cancer cases.
Triple-negative breast cancers are so named due to the lack of one of the three main molecular characteristics usually targeted by typical treatment methods, making them particularly deadly.
"The general idea behind the vaccine is that α-lactalbumin could be a so-called immunologic target – where we can stimulate the immune system to attack cells that make that protein," said G. Thomas Budd, the principal investigator on the trial.
Prior to this development, there have been various studies looking into vaccines against triple-negative breast cancer, and there have even been animal trials that have shown how training the immune system to target α-lactalbumin-producing cells can slow down the growth of tumors, or even prevent them from occurring in the first place.
"What we're trying to do is what we call primary intervention," said Vincent Tuohy – the primary inventor of the vaccine who has worked on developing it for nearly two decades. "It's actually preventing the disease from occurring – it was never there to begin with."
"We're not trying to prevent recurrence," he added. "We're trying to prevent the emergence of the tumor and prevent it from ever happening."
The next step: Will it work on humans?
Following an approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for it to be classified as a drug, the vaccine will now finally move onto clinical human trials.
The first phase of the trial will see the vaccine tested on 18 to 24 patients who have already completed treatment for early-stage triple-negative breast cancer within the past three years, are tumor-free, but are also at high-risk for recurrence of the cancer.
Success within this phase will see the trials move on to treating cancer-free women who are at high-risk of getting the disease, including groups with BRCA1 gene mutations that develop breast tumors classed as triple-negative breast cancer 70 to 80 percent of the time.
"We are hopeful that this research will lead to more advanced trials to determine the effectiveness of the vaccine against this highly-aggressive type of breast cancer," said Budd.
"Long-term, we are hoping that this can be a true preventive vaccine that would be administered to healthy women to prevent them from developing triple-negative breast cancer – the form of breast cancer for which we have the least effective treatments."
Should the whole trial prove successful, Tuohy even admitted that such vaccine strategies could possibly be applied to other types of tumors.
"If successful, these vaccines have the potential to transform the way we control adult-onset cancers and enhance life expectancy in a manner similar to the impact that the childhood vaccination program has had."
Indeed, apart from this breast cancer vaccine, human trials have also started on a vaccine targeting colorectal cancer, while there are also other vaccines being developed for various other types of cancer ranging from skin cancer to lung cancer.
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Cover image sourced from Healio and The West Australian. For illustration purposes only.
