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WASHINGTON: Researchers who designed
one experimental breast cancer vaccine say they have fine-tuned the process and
come up with another that they hope will be more effective.
Their
new vaccine delivers a cancer-fighting gene into cells, which then produce
immune system proteins as well as tumour-destroying cells.
“In our
own mind it is a very significant advance because we have put the gene into the
cells in the body. The vaccine is produced by your own cells,” Wei-Zen Wei
of Wayne State University in Detroit, who led the study, said in a telephone
interview. “It is made right in your body.”
The vaccine
eliminated tumours in mice from a type of cancer called HER2 positive cancer,
they reported in the journal Cancer Research. HER2-positive cancers account for
between 20% and 30% of breast cancers.
It even worked to eliminate
HER2 tumours that had developed resistance to drugs designed to fight them, the
said. The HER2/neu protein is over-expressed, meaning it is over-active, in
several tumours including breast, colorectal and ovarian cancer.
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