The new vaccine causes the body’s immune system to home in on a protein called mammaglobin-A, found almost exclusively in breast tissue. The protein’s role in healthy tissue is unclear, but breast tumors express it at abnormally high levels, past research has shown.
“Being able to target mammaglobin is exciting because it is expressed broadly in up to 80 percent of breast cancers, but not at meaningful levels in other tissues,” said breast cancer surgeon and senior author William E. Gillanders, MD, professor of surgery. “In theory, this means we could treat a large number of breast cancer patients with potentially fewer side effects.
The vaccine primes a type of white blood cell, part of the body’s adaptive immune system, to seek out and destroy cells with the mammaglobin-A protein.
Although the trial was designed to test vaccine safety, preliminary evidence indicated the vaccine slowed the cancer’s progression, even in patients who tend to have less potent immune systems because of their advanced disease and exposure to chemotherapy.
Of the 14 patients who received the vaccine, about half showed no progression of their cancer one year after receiving the vaccine. In a similar control group of 12 patients who were not vaccinated, about one-fifth showed no cancer progression at the one-year follow-up. Despite the small sample size, this difference is statistically significant.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141201090313.htm
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