Scientists at the University of Georgia and the Mayo Clinic in Arizona have discovered what may be a dramatic breakthrough in efforts to fight breast cancer. The researchers have developed a vaccine that successfully reduced tumors in mice.
Dr. Sandra Gendler, Grohne Professor of Therapeutics for Cancer Research at the Mayo Clinic, developed special mice for the study whose tumors mimic those of human breast and pancreatic cancer patients. Dr. Gedgler states, “This is the first time that a vaccine has been developed that trains the immune system to distinguish and kill cancer cells based on their different sugar structures.” In this research on the new vaccine, tumor size in mice was reduced by an average of 80 percent.
Dr. Gendler and her colleague Geert-Jan Boons, the Franklin Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia, are currently testing the vaccine’s effectiveness against human cancer cells in a laboratory setting. They hope they can begin clinical trials on human subjects by the end of 2013.
The findings were reported online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.