You may have seen a flurry of recent news headlines about a woman in Florida named Lee Mercker who was given a “breast cancer vaccine” that effectively eliminated her cancer cells. The headlines might seem unusual; after all, most people associate “vaccines” with infectious or communicable diseases such as tetanus, measles, and polionot with cancer. But what this woman received isn’t actually a “vaccine” in the same sense as, say, a flu shot. A flu shot is meant to protect people who don’t have the flu from getting it in the first place, while this new breast cancer vaccine that’s being tested is meant to treat people who already have early-stage breast cancer.
SurvivorNet spoke with the Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Saranya Chumsri, one of the breast cancer oncologists leading the research on the new vaccine. She told us that the vaccine is a form of cancer treatment called immunotherapy (although it works differently from the immunotherapy drugs we hear about most such as Keytruda, a checkpoint inhibitor). It works by stimulating the body's immune system, in turn, prompting someone’s own immune cells to attack and kill their breast cancer cells.
Vaccines For Cancer -- Promising (But Early) Research
So When Will More Women Be Able to Get This Vaccine?
If (and that is a very important "if") all goes well with the next steps for the research, Dr. Chumsri told SurvivorNet that it will still be a number of years before the breast cancer vaccine is widely available. "Hopefully, with all of these trials and if they are successful, it probably will be at least more than 5-7 years or so," she said.The research that would occur during those years is really important, because right now, the breast cancer vaccine is only in its phase I clinical trial. This means it's only being tested in a very small number of patients to see if it's safe and tolerable. After the phase I trial, the breast cancer vaccine will still need to go through two more phases of clinical trials to show that it actually works on a large scale (so in many, many more women than just Lee Mercker) and for a longer period of time.
The Research Still Has a Long Way to Go
Speaking with SurvivorNet about a different flurry of exciting headlines (about a treatment for bladder cancer), Dr. Jay Shah, a urologic oncologist at Stanford Medicine, previously explained the preliminary nature of phase I clinical trials to SurvivorNet.
"If you have a new agent that you want to test and you think you've made progress in terms of what you know about it in the lab, you have to do a phase I study to make sure it's safe. That's all a phase I study is; it's 'is it tolerable or not?' You can't actually make conclusions about the efficacy of the drug. That's not at all what a phase I study is for."
With the treatment Dr. Shah was discussing, similar to this breast cancer vaccine, there had been one patient who responded very well to the treatment (his bladder cancer tumors disappeared almost entirely). But as Dr. Shah told us, "I think it's very dangerous to take the results from that one person and say, 'Oh, this is going to be the future.'"
Even so, it's exciting to think of the possibility of a vaccine for breast cancerand according to Dr. Chumsri, it's shown positive results in other patients as well. But it will take rigorous testing and much more research to know for sure.
Are Researchers Developing Cancer Vaccines for Other Cancers, Or Just Breast Cancer?
Actually, there are a number of clinical trials testing out cancer vaccines in various cancers. Dr. Sagar Lonial of the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University, for instance, previously told SurvivorNet about an ongoing trial testing a vaccine to help prevent the blood cancer multiple myeloma from recurring.
RELATED: Testing a Vaccine to Help Prevent Multiple Myeloma Recurrence
Dr. Sagar Lonial spoke with SurvivorNet about a vaccine to prevent recurrence in multiple myeloma.
In both casesof the breast cancer vaccine and of the multiple myeloma vaccinethe patient receiving the vaccine needs to have cancer cells first for it to be useful. That is, the vaccine can't just be given to anyone and everyone and be expected to prevent the cancer.
According to Dr. Jim Allison, Chair of the Department of Immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center and winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medine, "the thinking of a vaccine where we can prevent cancer, treat it before it’s known to be there, is going to be rough, I think. Because you’ve got to know, in some way, what the target antigen is."
Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Jim Allison spoke with SurvivorNet about cancer vaccines and what’s next.
Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.
