Vaccine for Breast Cancer to Be Tested on Human Patients

SCIENTISTS have taken major strides towards developing a breast cancer vaccine through successful tests on animals.

The vaccine, which helps the immune system to target a protein found in 80% of breast tumours, is now to be tried out on human patients.

In mice, the treatment caused tumours with the mammaglobin-A protein to stop growing and then shrink.

The compound did not have an adverse effect on healthy cells.

Scientists at Washington University and the Siteman Cancer Centre in St Louis made the vaccine from copies of the DNA sequence that makes mammaglobin-A.

Dr Thalachallour Mohanakumar, one of the scientists who carried out the research, said: “Now that we’ve found how effectively an immune response can be generated to mammaglobin-A, we plan to conduct clinical trials in patients who are at very high risk for breast cancer and in patients who have had a relapse after initial treatment.

“We want to see if giving patients the DNA vaccine can prevent or eliminate breast cancer or at least slow its growth.”

Experts welcomed the news, but cautioned against raising hopes, pointing out that many so-called future cures fall at the human testing hurdle.

In Scotland, there are an estimated 40,000 breast cancer victims and more than 3400 cases are diagnosed every year.

Survival rates have soared from around 60% women diagnosed in the early 1980s to almost 80% now, helped by improved screening and treatment.

Henry Snowcroft, cancer information specialist with Cancer Research UK, said:

“The field of cancer vaccine research is finally starting to yield very promising results.

“This work in the breast cancer vaccine field is at the very early stages and we await future results with much interest.”