Closing In On A Vaccine For Breast Cancer

Progress toward development of a breast cancer vaccine has been reported by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine and the Siteman Cancer Center in St. Louis. Cancer-fighting vaccines stimulate immune cells to recognize tumor cells as foreign and destroy them. Physicians believe a vaccine-induced immune response could be used to supplement other cancer therapies or to immunize high-risk people against cancer. "We've been studying a protein called mammaglobin-A found in 80 percent of breast tumors," says Thalachallour Mohanakumar, Ph.D., the Jacqueline G. and William E. Maritz Professor of Immunology and Oncology in the Department of Surgery and at the Siteman Cancer Center. "The protein is especially interesting for cancer immunotherapy because of its frequent occurrence and because breast tumors express it at high levels." In articles in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, the researchers report that they constructed a vaccine consisting of copies of the DNA sequence that makes mammaglobin-A in humans.