A Vaccine for Breast Cancer?

cancer prevention is a major goal in health reason s research one major Milestone was the HPV vaccine which targets a virus that's responsible for different types of cancer mainly cervical cancer now we've got some recent excitement in the news about a possible breast cancer vaccine how does this vaccine work how successful is it and when might it become available that's the topic of this week's Healthcare trip [Music] in November of 2022 an article was published in the journal Jama oncology that covered the clinical trial results for a breast cancer vaccine that has been many many years in the making this was a phase one non-randomized clinical trial with 66 Advanced stage breast cancer patients patients had what is called her2 or her2 positive breast cancer with her too being the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 protein which is quite a mouthful in short an overabundance of this protein helps cancer cells grow and its Presence at high levels is responsible for 20 to 25 percent of all breast cancers this knowledge has led to many targeted therapies for her2 positive breast cancer patients and it's the basis for the clinical trial at hand it looks at the ability of a plasmid-based vaccine designed to increase her to specific tea helper cells let's break that down a little plasmid is a small circular DNA molecule that can be found in some microscopic organisms like bacteria this circular DNA is different than the genomic DNA you might be more used to hearing about a plasmid-based vaccine is a vaccine that introduces a plasmid containing a specific DNA sequence in this case that sequence codes for a specific part of the her2 receptor protein the idea is that this will lead to a strong immune response against the whole protein via the creation of immune cells called t cells that will specifically recognize and then Target the her2 Protein that's still a lot so to summarize this vaccine is designed to train the immune system to recognize and attack breast cancer cells that Express the her2 protein a protein known to cause somewhere around a quarter of all breast cancers all right so these 66 women in the trial had Advanced stage metastatic breast cancer that had either gone into a mission or was largely reduced they were each assigned to one of three vaccine doses received three times along with an immune stimulating drug after which they were followed up for several years at the end of the trial more patients survived than would be expected at Baseline for individuals with similar stages of cancer and no vaccine keep in mind that this is a non-rated non-controlled trial that measured immune cell levels not cancer growth so it's hard to pin anything to the vaccine just yet instead as is the purpose of a phase one trial the idea here was to assess both safety and the ability of different doses to elicit a satisfactory immune response and there's good news on both fronts because the her2 protein isn't specific to breast cancer cells it was important to make sure that eliciting this immune response didn't wreak havoc on the rest of the body and it did not side effects were limited and manageable for all doses with many being common to currently improved vaccines the data on immune responses suggested that the two higher doses were the best performers though immunity levels after vaccination were lower in some patients who received the highest vaccine dose which seemed to be associated with persistent plasmid DNA at the injection site making the middle dose the probable favorite this is all super exciting but definitely keep in mind that we don't know yet if the vaccine stops or shrinks cancer growth this is something we can look at in phase two trials and good news those are now underway if those are successful there will still be phase 3 trials and FDA approvals and all that jazz so we still have a way to go but we're well on our way Adrian enjoyed this episode you might enjoy this previous series on the history present and future of vaccines we'd appreciate it if you'd like this video subscribe to the Channel Down Below consider going to patreon.com healthcare trash where you can help make the show bigger and better we'd like to especially thank our research Associates Jose Edward little home and Brian Nam and of course our surgeon Admiral Sam

Channel: Healthcare Triage

Views: 17,176

Keywords: health, healthcare, health care, health insurance, health policy, Aaron Carroll

Id: VsZDAbKB2vQ

Length: 4min 28sec (268 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023