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A Publication for Baylor Scott & White Health’ s Oncology Program
“ We’ re trying to innovate. We’ re trying to push the field forward. We’ re trying to do something for this cancer that has such a great unmet medical need,” she said.
The first of these women on the study,“ Safety study of chemotherapy combined with dendritic cell vaccine to treat breast cancer,” was dosed in December 2013. Since then, two have died from disease recurrence.“ The other eight remain without any detectable disease,” Dr. O’ Shaughnessy said.
“ These patients all had very high risk of dying from triple-negative breast cancer without effective therapy,” she said.“ The whole idea is to wake up these dendritic cells, which basically are not functioning. Their immune system was not working to kill off this cancer.”
Genomic-driven targeted therapies can also help TNBC patients, but these cancers are often driven by multiple mutations. What if there are other mutations ready to step to the plate and take over?“ When we think about targeted therapies, we think about a drug targeted against one mutation or one driving [ cellular ] pathway in the cancer,” Dr. O’ Shaughnessy said.
“ That’ s the beauty of an immunotherapy. If you can get the immune system stimulated against the cancer, it will just kill it, regardless of how many mutations there are.”
Still, she is not ready to talk about this clinical trial as promising just yet. She had hoped that more of the women in the study would have registered a pathological complete response( PCR), meaning no cancer in their breast or lymph nodes, prior to surgery. As it was, approximately half recorded a PCR, about the same as standard chemotherapy.
One outstanding question is whether the dendritic cell therapy activated the immune system and either held off or eradicated any residual microscopic disease. As she waits to see if the eight women in the study will remain free of cancer for at least three years, Dr. O’ Shaughnessy is hopeful that the vaccine will continue to act as a maintenance drug.
This study was funded by the Amy T. Selkirk Fund for Breast Cancer Immunotherapy, part of Baylor Health Care System Foundation.