The study is made possible through a unique $500,000 grant from the "Avon-NCI Progress for Patients" Awards program, a special private-public partnership between the Avon Foundation, Inc. and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) dedicated to accelerating early phase clinical research into promising therapies.
"This is the first clinical study to use a telomerase peptide as a possible vaccine against breast cancer," said lead researcher Robert Vonderheide, MD, DPhil, an assistant professor at the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. "Our hope is that the immune response will kill the cancer and improve the health of patients."
Twenty-eight patients with metastatic breast cancer will be enrolled in the study, which is expected to last two years. Patients will be injected with one of three escalating doses of the telomerase antigen in combination with adjuvant therapies (granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor, GM-CSF) over a period of seven months. The immune and tumor response to the telomerase-based vaccine will be monitored over the duration of the study and compared to a control response to an injection of cytomegalovirus peptide.
Avon/NCI-Funded Breast Cancer Vaccine Trial
The results of an earlier feasibility study also led by Vonderheide and published in the February 1st edition of the journal Clinical Cancer Research showed immune responses with little toxicity in seven breast and prostate cancer patients after t
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Contact: David March
david.march@uphs.upenn.edu
215-615-3353
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
9-Feb-2004