Surgeons to Begin Testing Vaccine for Breast Cancer Treatment

Now this could be great news. St. Lukes is working on new breast cancer drugs, the most promising of which will be a vaccine that could prevent breast cancer entirely. That would be FANTASTIC. Even though there are lots of breast care treatment options available, I think everyone here would be OK if it just stopped existing. I know I would.

When it comes to developing a cancer vaccine, Dr. Lee Riley admits he’s not a patient man.

That’s why the St. Luke’s Hospital cancer surgeon and researcher has turned his focus from liver cancer and melanoma to the most common cancer affecting women: breast cancer.

The way Riley sees it, the larger pool of candidates could shorten the time it takes to determine what works and what doesn’t — from 20 years to two.

”I don’t want to take baby steps,” he said.

Most breast cancer vaccine studies nationwide focus on women with advanced disease, but Riley’s will look at women in the early stages of the disease. They represent about half of all breast cancer diagnoses, he said, and may stand to benefit more from early treatment.

Riley wants to enroll 10-20 women, zap their tumors with high-energy radio waves, then inject the tumor with an approved immune system stimulant.

The hope is to turn cells inside the tumor into an arsenal of cancer fighters that continue to kill for years, much like a tetanus shot works to fend off bacterial infections for 10 years or more.

When used in cancer research, the term vaccine is not the same as a vaccine against polio or the flu, for example, which can prevent a healthy person from getting sick. Cancer vaccines are designed to prevent recurrence.

Many are under development across the country, including more than 30 against advanced breast cancers, one against melanoma at Lehigh Valley Hospital and one that shows such promise against a specific kind of lung cancer that the major drug company GlaxoSmithKline is sponsoring a multi-center trial enrolling thousands of patients.

Yet vaccines that effectively treat existing tumors appear to be a long way off. None has been approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, according to Jill O’Donnell-Tormey, executive director of the Cancer Research Institute, a nonprofit organization that supports and coordinates immuno-therapy research against cancer. Even Gardasil, the so-called cervical cancer vaccine approved by the FDA in 2006, works by preventing certain types of viral infections that can lead to cervical cancer.

At St. Luke’s, the breast cancer study will test the effects of several already-approved immune system stimulants on a patient’s tumor and two lymph nodes: the ‘’sentinel” node into which the tumor drains and another.

The goal is to find the stimulant - or combination - that produces enough of an immune system reaction to fight cancer cells but not turn the immune system against healthy cells.