A first-of-its-kind breast cancer vaccine has been successfully tested on mice.
“We believe that this vaccine will someday be used to prevent breast cancer in adult women in the same way that vaccines prevent polio and measles in children,” said Vincent Tuohy, the study’s lead investigator and an immunologist at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute Department of Immunology.
“If it works in humans the way it works in mice, this will be monumental. We could eliminate breast cancer.”
The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, takes a new approach to vaccination.
Cancer is particularly difficult to vaccinate against, because unlike viruses, which the immune system recognizes as foreign invaders, cancer is actually an over-development of the body’s own cells.
That means any vaccine tackling cell overgrowth would end up vaccinating against a patient’s own body, destroying healthy tissues.
But the new vaccine targets the antigen a-lactalbumin ‹ a protein that is found in most breast cancers, but is not found in healthy women, except during lactation.
The researchers tested the vaccine on mice, giving half of them a vaccine with a-lactalbumin and the other half one without it.
None of the mice vaccinated with a-lactalbumin developed breast cancer, while all of the other mice did.
“Most attempts at cancer vaccines have targeted viruses, or cancers that have already developed,” said Dr. Joseph Crowe, director of the Breast Center at Cleveland Clinic. “Dr. Tuohy is not a breast cancer researcher, he’s an immunologist, so his approach is completely different ‹ attacking the tumour before it can develop. It’s a simple concept, yet one that has not been explored until now.”
The next step is to test the vaccine on humans. It could be years before it’s approved and becomes available to the public.
If it does become available, however, Tuohy proposes a strategy in which all women over 40 receive the vaccine, as they are at greater risk of developing breast cancer and are less likely to become pregnant. An inability to breastfeed is a side-effect of the vaccine.
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