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Vaccine Nips Breast Cancer In The Bud
3/1/2004

Source: Journal of Clinical Investigation


Preneoplastic lesions, detectable by breast cancer screening, are made
up of altered cells that are not themselves cancerous but indicate an
increased likelihood that a benign or cancerous tumor may subsequently
form. In the March 1 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation,
Federica Cavallo and colleagues from the University of Turin, Italy,
evaluated vaccine strategies for treating neoplastic lesions. The
authors designed a combined approach consisting of a primary
vaccination with plasmids encoding portions of the oncogenic protein
rp185neu and a booster vaccination one week later with cells
expressing this protein and also engineered to release IFN-gamma. Of
mice that received the combined vaccine, 48% remained tumor free for
the duration of the study, a significant improvement over untreated
mice and mice receiving only the primary vaccine. Both morphologic
****ysis of the lesions and microarray ****ysis of gene expression in
parallel revealed that the immune reaction halted carcinogenesis and
reverted neoplastic lesions to an early stage. This study highlights
the potential of a combinatorial approach to vaccination for the
prevention and suppression of neoplastic lesions.

http://news.biocompare.com/newsstory.asp?id=29194