The researchers recently completed a 10-year study of the vaccine, known as E75, which was tested on more than 100 female soldiers recovering from breast cancer along with a similar number of civilian women. Army Col. George Peoples, who founded the Cancer Vaccine Development Program — an Army research network studying vaccines’ potential to fight breast, ovarian, uterine and prostate cancers — said the trial indicated the vaccine halves the risk that a woman’s breast cancer will return. The Army has licensed the vaccine to pharmaceutical company Galena Biopharma, which is conducting a final set of trials with the goal of producing an approved drug within four years, he said.
Breast cancer research has been in the spotlight, thanks in part to promotional campaigns such as NFL players wearing pink on the field with the items then sold off to raise research funds, but thereÂ’s less awareness about the increased risk of the disease for military personnel. A 2009 study by the U.S. Military Cancer Institute found rates among active female soldiers, who often work in toxic environments, were 20 percent to 40 percent higher than for the general population.
Once the vaccine is mixed with a stimulator, it is then injected into the skin of a cancer patient. Military researchers says they have developed a vaccine that appears to protect women against a recurrence of breast cancer.
Peoples said that’s likely partly due to female soldiers being screened more regularly, but there’s plenty of impetus for the Army to develop more effective treatments for cancers that also impact male soldiers, dependents and retirees. “Breast cancer is very prevalent within all these populations in the military community,” he said. “All these cancers are things we see on a day-to-day basis in our military health-care system.” Vaccines can stop the spread of cancers in the same way that they fight infectious diseases — by training the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells, Peoples said. Dr. Keith Knutson, a cancer immunologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said that vaccines have been approved to protect people from viruses that cause liver and cervical cancer, and that researchers are tackling other causes. “We are in the stage now where we are looking at vaccines that prevent recurrence rather than preventing the diseases all together,” he said. “One day there could be vaccines that prevent breast or other cancers all together.”
The E75 vaccine targets a protein expressed in breast cancer cells. “It is the same protein targeted by the (cancer) drug Herceptin,” Peoples said, adding that the protein is expressed in several other types of cancer cells, including prostate cancer. Herceptin, however, is most effective in treating cancers with high levels of a certain protein, HER2, Peoples said. The new vaccine is able to treat all common cancers, such as breast, prostate, ovarian, colon and lung, he said. E75 also is proving equally effective at protecting people against those diseases, he said.
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