CHAPEL HILL -- Doctors at the University of North Carolina have opened their first clinical trial of a vaccine treatment for advanced breast cancer.
After more than four years of test tube and animal studies, researchers at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center will find out if intravenous infusions of their genetically engineered protein fragments will stimulate a person's immune cells to recognize and kill breast cancer cells, causing advanced breast tumors to shrink.
"This breast cancer vaccine is not a shot. It's a 'vaccine' because it should work by enhancing the patient's own immune response against their tumor," said Lineberger member Jonathan Serody, MD, associate professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology at UNC-CH School of Medicine.
"This is the first use of a vaccine directed against a modification of a specific part of the HER-2/neu protein found on breast cancer cells," he added. People have tried using engineered proteins in the treatment of melanoma but not for breast cancer." A breast cancer patient from Rochester, New York, is scheduled for her first vaccine infusion Thursday July 6, 2000.
Dr. Serody noted that current treatments, although helpful, do not cure an adequate number of women with advanced breast cancer, in which the disease has spread beyond the breast. "Often women with this disease have responses to treatment, but these are of brief duration and are not durable," he explained." he explained.
At the heart of the new treatment is the dendritic cell, a type of white blood cell that alerts the immune system to the presence of abnormal cellular proteins. The dendritic cells snatch fragments of these proteins and race to the lymph nodes to display them as targets for an immune response. Regiments of killer T-cells then proliferate, seek out and cause the destruction of cells carrying the targeted protein.
Led by Drs. Ed Collins, Jeffrey Frelinger, Roland Tisch and Jonathan Serody, the UNC rese
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Contact: Leslie H. Lang
llang@med.unc.edu
919-843-9687
University of North Carolina School of Medicine
29-Jun-2000