World-first technique brings breast cancer vaccine closer

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By Candace Davis
December 04, 2006 EAST

A novel technique being developed at the MMRI will enable researchers to find proteins critical to breast cancer immunotherapy more quickly, testing up to 2000 genes in a matter of weeks.

Lead researcher, Dr Kristen Radford, said using this faster screening technique to find new the all-important proteins meant a treatment could be available sooner.

“Immunotherapy treatment for breast cancer relies on finding cancer-specific proteins but unfortunately very few of these proteins have been identified because it can take many years to test a single protein,” Dr Radford said.

MMRI researchers have a library of 2000 breast cancer genes ready to screen once the technique is refined. Dr Radford said they were still in the early stages but planned to use any new proteins they discovered to develop a dendritic cell vaccine that could potentially stop breast cancer in its tracks.

“MMRI focuses on developing treatments which teach the body to heal itself meaning little to no side effects for patients,” Dr Radford said. “Dendritic cells are the key to our research because they activate the body’s natural defence against illness and disease — the immune system.”

Dr Radford said one of the reasons cancer was able to grow and spread around the body was because cancer cells were very good at hiding from the immune system.

“If the immune system doesn’t know the cancer is there, it can’t fight it. Our strategy for overcoming this problem is fairly simple — we draw the cancer cells out of hiding and re-train the immune system to attack the cancer.”

The treatment would initially be offered to patients with late stage disease and if successful could eventually be given to patients following surgery to prevent the cancer recurring.

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